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Wynnere and Wastoure and the Influence of Political Prophecy Victoria Flood :\QQHUHDQG:DVWRXUHDQGWKH,QIOXHQFHRI3ROLWLFDO 9LFWRULD)ORRG3URSKHF\ The Chaucer Review, Volume 49, Number 4, 2015, pp. 427-448 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\3HQQ6WDWH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cr/summary/v049/49.4.flood.html Access provided by Boston College (20 Dec 2015 22:23 GMT) Wynnere and Wastoure and the Influence of Political Prophecy victoria flood abstract: This article examines the debt of the Middle English debate poem Wynnere and Wastoure to a long-lived culture of political prophecy with particular utility during the reign of Edward III. It explores the poet’s familiarity with a prophetic tradition endorsing the authority of the kings of England, derived from the writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Alongside other sources, the Wynnere poet is understood to be acquainted with The Prophecy of the Last Six Kings to Follow John and possibly variations on this in the poetry of Laurence Minot, as well as prophetic material ascribed to the Scottish border prophet Thomas of Erceldoune. Awareness of the Wynnere poet’s engagement with prophetic tra- ditions challenges prior scholarly understandings of his attitude toward royal authority, as well as critical commonplaces about the oppositional function of political prophecy, for underlying Wynnere and Wastoure is a vision of the imperial prowess of Edward III. The mid-fourteenth-century alliterative debate poem Wynnere and Wastoure occupies an anomalous position in modern categorizations of late medieval political literature. Not only does it span, post facto, critical genres, drawing on diverse elements from the political complaint to the royal ludus, but the political sympathy of its author is also a divisive subject. A debate between two allegorical figures representative of economic principles, Wynnere (the aggregation of wealth) and Wastoure (expenditure), the poem brings the suit of each against the other for arbitration before the king of England, who must choose between the virtues of winning and wasting.1 Although it has 1. All quotations and line references from the poem are taken from Stephanie Trigg, ed., Wynnere and Wastoure, EETS o.s. 297 (Oxford, 1990). the chaucer review, vol. 49, no. 4, 2015. Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 427 07/03/15 10:50 AM 428 The Chaucer Review been widely observed that the Wynnere poet shows a particular interest in an economic vision that can be understood to be national, his attitude toward royal authority remains controversial.2 Some critics have read radical dis- sent into the work, while others have seen overt flattery of the king.3 This article suggests that, in order to understand the poet’s political orientation, we must take into account his engagement with another literary discourse used to comment on royal and national affairs: political prophecy. By this, I mean a body of Latin, Anglo-Norman, and English language compositions of the early to mid-fourteenth century, drawing on material from the twelfth- century Prophetiae Merlini of Geoffrey of Monmouth.4 Although prophetic influences on Wynnere and Wastoure have been given some previous attention, the full extent of these influences has yet to be documented. This reexamination will bring new source traditions under consideration, charting both better and less-observed prophetic influences on the poem. I will begin with previously unnoted prophetic allusions in the poem’s conclusion, before turning to its more widely discussed prologue, which, when viewed in the context of the work’s prophetic trajectory, reveals a political optimism beneath its apparent pessimism. This evidence is sugges- tive of the Wynnere poet’s enthusiastic engagement with the imperial image of 2. For discussions of the poet’s understanding of a national economy, see Lois Roney, “Winner and Waster’s ‘Wyse Wordes’: Teaching Economics and Nationalism in Fourteenth-Century E n g l an d ,” Speculum 69 (1994): 1070–1100; and Brantley L. Bryant, “Talking with the Taxman about Poetry: England’s Economy in ‘Against the King’s Taxes’ and Wynnere and Wastoure,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 5 (2008): 219–48. These discussions build on earlier work under- taken by John Scattergood, whose conceptions about the poem and its national vision are, however, problematic (“Winner and Waster and the Mid-Fourteenth-Century Economy,” in Tom Dunne, ed., The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence [Cork, 1987], 39–57). See also James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547 (Oxford, 2002), 223–24. 3. Conservative readings have been suggested by John Speirs, Medieval English Poetry: The Non-Chaucerian Tradition (London, 1971), 267; Juliet Vale, Edward III and Chivalry: Chivalric Society and its Context, 1270–1350 (Woodbridge, 1982), 75; Roney, “Winner and Waster’s ‘Wyse Wordes,’” 1099–1100; and Bryant, “Talking with the Taxman,” 224–46. For oppositional readings, see Thomas H. Bestul, Satire and Allegory in Wynnere and Wastoure (Lincoln, Neb., 1974), 48–51; Scattergood, “Winner and Waster,” esp. 48–49, 54; Warren Ginsberg, “Introduction,” in Wynnere and Wastoure and the Parliament of the Thre Ages, ed. Warren Ginsberg (Kalamazoo, 1992), 43–78; David V. Harrington, “Indeterminacy in Wynnere and Wastoure and the Parliament of the Three Ages,” Chaucer Review 20 (1986): 246–57, at 254; and Jerry D. James, “The Undercutting of Conventions in Wynnere and Wastoure,” Modern Language Quarterly 25 (1964): 243–58, at 253. 4. The Prophetiae Merlini survives as Book VII of Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain: An Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum (Historia regem Britanniae), ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge, 2007), 142–59. Citations from this work are provided (by line number) from this edition in the text of this essay. For analysis of political proph- ecy as a discourse, and the most comprehensive work to date produced on the English prophetic tradition, see Lesley A. Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2000). This supersedes Rupert Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England (New York, 1911). CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 428 07/03/15 10:50 AM victoria flood 429 Edward III as it was constructed in political prophecies invested in Edward’s claim to the French throne in the early years of the Hundred Years’ War. The Background of Wynnere and Wastoure Although Wynnere and Wastoure survives only in the mid-fifteenth-century London, British Library MS Additional 31042, compiled in Yorkshire by Robert Thornton (compiler also of Lincoln Cathedral MS 91), it is generally understood to be a composition of the reign of Edward III. Scholars now, with some assurance, root the composition of the text in the period identified by Stephanie Trigg: 1352–70.5 Although the text’s long-accepted allusions to the events of 1352–53—specifically, the Statute of Treason and the activities of Justice William de Shareshull in Cheshire (alluded to in lines 126–33)— were questioned by Elizabeth Salter in her 1978 article, these historical ref- erences are now commonly accepted.6 More recently, Thorlac Turville-Petre has suggested a bias toward the earlier years of this time frame,7 and certainly the Wynnere poet’s engagements with the imperial image of Edward III and the success of his French wars represent a viewpoint that cannot be pressed into the 1360s and 70s, when political commentators writing across England appear to have been uniformly disillusioned with Edward’s campaigns. As I will demonstrate, while works from this later period share some prophetic material with Wynnere and Wastoure, they belong to a very different political climate. The poem reads as a continuation of a prophetic tradition rooted in Edward’s early successes in Scotland and claims on France in the late 1330s and 40s. It belongs to a period when the king still promised great things. The precise geographical location of Thornton’s exemplar remains uncertain. The London Thornton witness is generally understood to be in a mixed dialect with dominant West Midland features (although a less con- vincing case has also been made for an East Midland origin).8 The poet’s allusions to William de Shareshull suggest a Cheshire connection, although 5. Trigg, Wynnere and Wastoure, xxv. 6. Elizabeth Salter, “The Timeliness of Wynnere and Wastoure,” Medium Ævum 47 (1978), 40–65. 7. Thorlac Turville-Petre, “Wynnere and Wastoure: When and Where?,” in L. A. J. R. Houwen and A. A. MacDonald, eds., Loyal Letters: Studies on Medieval Alliterative Poetry and Prose (Groningen, 1994), 155–66. 8. For discussion of the dialect of the poem as preserved in the London Thornton manuscript, see Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels and Michael Benskin, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, 4 vols. (Aberdeen, 1986), 1:101; Trigg, Wynnere and Wastoure, xvi–xxii. For an argument for the poet as a West Midland author with metropolitan interests, see Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, U.K., 1983), 18. CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 429 07/03/15 10:50 AM 430 The Chaucer Review this hypothesis has proven to be controversial.9 Juliet Vale has noted that the poet draws on details of Edward III’s 1352 Christmas ludi (held at Windsor), and he appears to have been familiar with the workings not only of the royal wardrobe but of the exchequer also.10 We might wonder if, like William Langland during the composition of Piers Plowman C-Text, the Wynnere poet was a western author writing in London. However, in a period when the royal court was itinerant (as, indeed, is depicted in the poem), easy divisions between the political culture of the capital and the provinces are problem- atic, and the court and royal household were subjects of interest in the West Midlands as much as in London.
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