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 traditions 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).

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 suggestive 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 prophecy 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 references 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 problematic, and the court and royal household were subjects of interest in the West Midlands as much as in London. Prophetic and poetic production in the West Midlands for the greater part of the reign of Edward III is suggestive of a considerable interest in the king and his international campaigns, and men from this region played an active role in France. In this particular respect, Cheshire, with its close connections to the royal house, has been considered a particularly strong candidate for the poem’s site of composition.11 Yet Cheshire was not a western locale unique in its royal political interests: two of the most important collections of political prophecy and poetry from the first half of the fourteenth century—London, British Library MS Harley MS 2253 and MS Royal 12.C.XII—were compiled by a scribe working in or close to Ludlow.12 Harley 2253 contains an important prophetic source text for Wynnere and Wastoure, discussed below, but this evidence contests rather than affirms any preconceptions we might have about the Wynnere poet’s localism. Prophecies relating to Edward III were in broad circulation across England, and this particular prophecy was based on an exemplar from the northern border with Scotland. The audience for which Wynnere and Wastoure was intended is as uncertain as its site of composition. It has long been understood as a text intended to influence economic policy, and it has been ventured that the

9. Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, 146n222. For a recent proposal of a Cheshire origin see Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, 231. 10. Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, 73–75, 175. 11. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, esp. 194–206, 231. 12. Although the date of the compilation of Harley 2253 is generally understood to be ca. 1340, the dates of the production of Royal 12.C.XII and its political prophecies are less certain. For discussion of the dates and provenance of the manuscripts, see E. J. Hathaway, P. T. Ricketts, C. A. Robson, and A. D. Wilshere, eds., Fouke le Fitz Waryn (Oxford, 1975), xxxvii–xxxviii; Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford, 1996), 192–203; Carter Revard, “Scribe and Provenance,” in Susanna Fein, ed., Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribe, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253 (Kalamazoo, 2000), 21–110; and Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 92–94.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 430 07/03/15 10:50 AM victoria flood 431

poem was produced for an aristocratic patron who exercised some mea- sure of in fluence in national economic affairs.13 However, it is impossible to say whether the poet’s allusion to the historical poetic patronage of “lordes in londe þat loued in thaire hertis / To here makers of myrthes, þat mat- irs couthe fynde” (lines 19–20) was anything more than formulaic, or if it can tell us something about the conditions under which the poem was produced.14 In the present state of research, there is no clear contemporary connection of the poem to any one household or patron. Salter long ago suggested the Wingfields of Sussex as patrons, on the basis of a possible allusion to the family’s coat of arms, although this hypothesis relies on her argument for a later date of composition.15 Some critics have held that Wynnere and Wastoure was written for the king himself, and here—at least in terms of poetic strategy—we may well be on firmer ground.16 As a poem that sets a debate before the king, Wynnere and Wastoure is engaged in a fantasy, if not a reality, of direct address to the king, a trope well noted in political poetry of the later fourteenth century.17

Political Prophecy, the French War, and the Poem’s Conclusion Although the Wynnere poet was by no means concerned solely with Edward’s French campaigns, they are an undoubted component of the poem’s historical and cultural context: Wynnere and Wastoure belongs to a period when questions of royal saving and spending were closely related to this matter. Edward’s French claim lies at the very foundation of the poet’s conceptualization of the king’s sovereignty: he incorporates an allusion to the English arms as they appeared after 1340 when Edward quartered the English leop- ards with the French fleur-de-lys. This appears in the poem as a symbol on the helmet of a “wodwyse” (wild man [line 71]), outside the king’s cabin, a

13. Scattergood, “Winner and Waster,” 54; and Speirs, Medieval English Poetry, 264–65. 14. David Starkey, “The Age of the Household: Politics, Society, and the Arts, c.1350–c.1550,” in Stephen Medcalf, ed., The Later Middle Ages (London, 1981), 225–90, at 245–46; Salter, “The Timeliness,” 52–54, 56–59; and Turville-Petre, “Wynnere and Wastoure,” 160–61. 15. Elizabeth Salter, “The Alliterative Revival,” Modern Philology 64 (1966): 146–50. 16. Nicolas Jacobs, “The Typology of Debate and the Interpretation of Wynnere and Wastoure,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 36 (1985): 481–500. 17. Elliot Kendall, Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household (Oxford, 2008); David R. Carlson, John Gower: Poetry and Propaganda in Fourteenth-Century England (Cambridge, U.K., 2012); Russell Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Carbondale, Ill., 1978); and Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 201–29.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 431 07/03/15 10:50 AM 432 The Chaucer Review

figure Vale has understood to be consistent with the tone of Edward’s courtly entertainments:18

the helme byhynde in the nekke Was casten full clenly in quarters foure; Two with flowres of Fraunse before and behynde, And two out of Ynglonde with orfraied [embroidered] bestes, Thre leberdes one lofte and thre on lowe vndir. (lines 76–80)

The reference to the king’s French interests that appears in the poem’s incomplete conclusion belongs to this broader historical context. It is one of the few direct allusions to royal spending habits: the king’s command for the use of aggregated wealth (“Wynnere”) in the funding of a military campaign in France. Issuing his judgment upon the debaters, the king orders Wynnere to accompany him at an appointed future time to Paris, where he will be dubbed a knight and granted silver and gold along with the king’s other followers. Then Wynnere is to ride with the king and his knights to the shrine of the Three Magi at Cologne Cathedral:

And wayte to me, þou Wynnere, if þou wilt wele chefe [prosper], When I wende appon werre my wyes to lede For at þe proude pales of Parys þe riche I thynk to do it in ded and dub þe to knyghte And giff giftes full grete of golde and of siluer To ledis of my legyance þat lufen me in hert. And sythen kayre [ride] as I come, with knyghtes þat me foloen To þe kirk of Colayne þer þe kynges ligges. (lines 496–503)

These lines hold important implications for the poet’s attitude toward the king, the wars, and contemporary royal economic policy. In 1941, in a view still widely accepted, Gardiner Stillwell argued that the poem’s conclusion articulates opposition to wartime taxation in the period 1352–53.19 Stillwell understood Wynnere as a merchant forced into the reluctant funding of wartime expenditure, and Wastoure as an aristocrat enthusiastically

18. Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, 73–75. 19. Gardiner Stillwell, “Wynnere and Wastoure and the Hundred Years’ War,” English Literary History 8 (1941): 241–47.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 432 07/03/15 10:50 AM victoria flood 433

campaigning in France under the king’s banner. For Stillwell, the king himself, in his command to Wynnere, becomes something of a waster. This assessment of the poet’s political position, regarding the wars as a waste of resources, has long been accepted.20 It is, however, textually insupportable. This final sequence is the only direct allusion made to the funding of the French campaigns in the poem, and these are the only lines that place either of the debaters in any relation to the French question. As Trigg has observed, the figures of Wynnere and Wastoure are implicated in a number of different contexts across the poem, drawing on diverse literary conventions— from ecclesiastical satire to considerations of poverty and wealth—and the two are not presented in consistent class terms: both engage variously with aristocratic and mercantile concerns.21 We cannot, then, necessarily hold either Wynnere or Wastoure to be representative of the interests of a particular class in the poem’s conclusion. Rather, the final sequence integrates Wynnere, a shifting signifier, into a new framework of meaning. As across the poem, how we understand this depends on our recognition of the conventions drawn on by the poet. In one respect, this allusion is grounded in political history. Israel Gollancz long ago suggested that the king’s journeys to Paris and Cologne recall his time spent in the German city in August 1338 to rally military and financial support for his French venture.22 This trip was an important moment not only in the history of Edward’s early actions against France but also in the formation of his imperial image: it was here that Emperor Louis IV appointed Edward Vicar of the Emperor in the Field, with extensive political authority over Germany and the Low Countries.23 However, in Wynnere and Wastoure Edward does not move from Cologne to Paris as part of a military alliance, but rather from the conquest of Paris to Cologne. This action is not a histo- ricized recollection; instead, it draws on another framework associated with the political expectations of this period. Although previously unnoted, the king’s journey in the poem, from the conquest of Paris to Cologne Cathedral, owes much to the career of the boar in the fourteenth-century Prophecy of

20. Bestul, Satire and Allegory, 49; and Scattergood, “Winner and Waster,” 50. 21. Stephanie Trigg, “The Rhetoric of Excess in Winner and Waster,” in Stephanie Trigg, ed., Medieval English Poetry (New York, 1993), 186–202, at 188. 22. Israel Gollancz, ed., A Good Short Debate between Winner and Waster (Cambridge, 1974). 23. W. M. Ormrod, Edward III (Stroud, 2005), 201; W. M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III (Stroud, 2000), 10; Benjamin Arnold, “England and Germany, 1050–1350,” in Michael Jones and Malcolm Vale, eds., England and Her Neighbours, 1066–1453: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais (London, 1989), 43–52, at 50.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 433 07/03/15 10:50 AM 434 The Chaucer Review

the Six Kings to Follow John, also known as the Last Six Kings of the English. Here the boar appears as a mighty warrior king and international conqueror, functioning as a cipher for Edward III. The boar’s conquest of Paris appears in a number of poems relating to the French wars that circulated during the mid-fourteenth century—a tradition to which the incomplete conclusion of Wynnere and Wastoure belongs. Although scholars have long associated the Six Kings with the early-fifteenth-century rebellion of the Percys and Owain Glyn Dŵr against Henry IV, it was in fact composed toward the end of the reign of Edward II.24 One of the most influential prophetic texts of the later Middle Ages, it is a series of animal ciphers inspired by the Prophetiae Merlini, which figures (in its earliest versions) three historical and three genuinely futurist rulers. Incorporated during the 1330s into the Anglo-Norman Brut as the prophecies of Merlin, the Six Kings shaped historical perspectives during the reign of Edward III. The earliest surviving version—an Anglo- Norman text termed the Original Prose Version—belongs to a period of considerable disillusionment in Edward II, when great expectations were invested in his heir the future Edward III. The goat (Edward II), in whose reign England suffers, is succeeded by a victorious boar (Edward III), a sequence partially indebted to the lascivious goat and kingly boar who appear in Prophetiae, lines 119–30. The historical meaning of these ciphers is very close to the surface: they are identified in relation to the birthplaces of Edward II and his son, the goat of Caernarfon and the boar of Windsor. The boar of Windsor subdues France, Germany, and Spain, conquering all the way to the “Burgh de Jherusalem.”25 Among his great achievements, he attacks the gates of Paris with his tusks (“anguisera ces dentz sur les portes de Paris”), an allusion borrowed from another boar of Prophetiae: the war- like “aper ex Conano” (lines 114–18), who sharpens his tusks on the forests of Gaul (for which the Six Kings author substitutes Paris) and conquers Europe as far as Spain.26 The sequence concludes with the burial of the boar at Cologne Cathedral among the Three Magi: “por sa noblesse enterre

24. T. M. Smallwood, “The Prophecy of the Six Kings,” Speculum 60 (1985): 571–92. For comment on the association of the prophecy with Owain Glyn Dŵr, see Helen Fulton, “Owain Glyn Dŵr and the Uses of Prophecy,” Studia Celtica 39 (2005): 105–21. 25. I quote the transcription from London, British Library MS Harley 746 in Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England, 160–64. Although there are problems with the transcription, it remains to date the only published version of this variant. A Middle English version is printed in F. W. D. Brie, ed., The Brut or the Chronicles of England, 2 vols., EETS u.s. 131, 136 (London, 1906, 1908), 1:74–75. 26. This source relationship is also noted by Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England, 51.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 434 07/03/15 10:50 AM victoria flood 435

entre les trois rois” (for his nobility he is interred among the three kings). In the later English Prose Translation of the prophecy (which was translated alongside the rest of the Brut in around 1370), this meaning is made explicit. Here we read of the boar, “after þat he is dede, for his douʒtynesse shal bene enterede at Coloigne.” This place of burial, like the imperial career itself, reads as a direct substitution of the English king for the Holy Roman Emperor, a figure who was the subject of a number of political prophecies recorded in England during this period. These gathered particular force in the years following the Anglo-Holy Roman diplomacy of 1338, although we can date interest in this substitution and the circulation of imperial Continental prophecies in England as early as the reign of Edward II.27 The Six Kings is indicative of an Anglicized imperial perception. It invokes a powerful imperial fantasy of pan-European conquest, even the unification of Christendom, and identifies Edward III as the subject of great prophetic expectations. This geographical trajectory (the movement from Paris to Cologne) was a deeply entrenched component of political prophetic discourse during this period, and to say, as does the Wynnere poet, that the English king will progress from the conquest of Paris to Cologne is to claim that he will win not only France but also Jerusalem. Although the Six Kings was not translated into English any earlier than 1370 (when it was translated with the rest of the Anglo-Norman Brut), the conquests of the boar were enthusiastically incorporated into English- language jingoist poems during the French wars—an important context for Wynnere and Wastoure. In his poetic treatment of Edward’s French battles, beginning with the English landing at Saint Vaast-la-Hougue (1346), Laurence Minot made use of this material. In a prophecy attributed to Merlin, Minot wrote of a fearsome “bare” (line 11) who would cross the sea from England to France: “And in France he suld bigin / To mak þam wrath þat er þarein” (lines 13–14).28 Minot extended this prophetically inspired history to a futurist vision of Edward’s conquest of Paris: “And in Paris þa high palays: / Now had þe bare with mekill blis” (lines 166–67). Wynnere and Wastoure was probably

27. This is a feature of a number of prophecies in London, British Library MS Royal 12.C.XII, discussed by J. R. S. Phillips, “Edward II and the Prophets,” in W. M. Ormrod, ed., England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1985 Harlaxton Symposium (Woodbridge, 1986), 196–201; and Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 94–96. Additional to these is “Ni pax formetur” (fol. 15v), which prophesies unified action against the lily of France by the English leopard and the eagle of the Holy Roman Empire. Although Coote has understood this material to predate Edward III’s French claim, the latter reads most coherently as a product of this period, although certainly the collection does incorporate some prophetic material from the reign of Edward II. 28. Joseph Hall, ed., The Poems of Laurence Minot (Oxford, 1914), 21–27 (Poem VII).

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 435 07/03/15 10:50 AM 436 The Chaucer Review

written within less than a decade of Minot’s verses, and in his allusion to the activities of the boar in Paris, the Wynnere poet may have been directly influenced by Minot. There is a notable verbal parallel between the journey of the boar to Minot’s “high palays” and the journey of Edward to the “proude pales” in the conclusion of Wynnere and Wastoure. However, the Wynnere poet was also aware of the Six Kings directly: the journey to Cologne does not appear in Minot, and the Wynnere poet’s encounter with this particular monument of the English prophetic tradition must have been direct as well as derivative. This prophetic movement should be understood in the context of a broader Galfridian political culture. This fits neatly with the royal Arthurian pageantry of Edward’s reign (like the reign of his grandfather Edward I before him)—spectacles with which it has been suggested the Wynnere poet was familiar.29 If Edward III was the boar of the Six Kings, then he was also cut from the same cloth as Arthur, the greatest of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s British kings. In Prophetiae, lines 39–42, Arthur appears as the boar of Cornwall and, like the boar of Prophetiae, lines 114–18, conquers France: “Gallicanos saltus possidebit” (will occupy the glades of France [line 41]). Given the continued popularity of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the relationship of the boar of the Six Kings to Arthur would have been clear to any prophetically-minded writer (and reader) of this period. These prophetic strands find an important conflation roughly contemporary with Wynnere and Wastoure in the envis- aging of Edward’s French conquests by the anonymous author of the 1346 Latin Invective against France (which, notably, belongs to the same year as Minot’s prophetic verses). Here the name Arthur appears as a synonym for both the boar and Edward: “Rex bonus Arthurus, Francos replendo dolore. / Dentes aprini fient clavi Parisini” (Good King Arthur, the French will be filled with sorrow. The boar’s tusks will become the key to Paris).30 This is a reworking of the whetting of the boar’s tusks on the gates of Paris in the Six Kings and the forests of Gaul in Prophetiae, lines 114–18: the might of the boar secures entry into the city. In his use of the Six Kings, the Wynnere poet engaged with the Arthurian tenor of his time. It was a most appropriate mode of royal address.

29. This is one of the most important elements of Edward’s royal ludi discussed by Vale, Edward III and Chivalry. See also R. S. Loomis, “Edward I, Arthurian Enthusiast,” Speculum 28 (1953): 114–27. 30. Thomas Wright, ed., Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History, Composed during the Period from the Accession of Edward III to that of Richard III, 2 vols. (London, 1859, 1861), 1:26–40, at 31.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 436 07/03/15 10:50 AM victoria flood 437

A number of scholars have suggested that the poem is unlikely to have extended much further beyond Wynnere’s proposed journey.31 Indeed, in many respects, this prophetic allusion provides a fitting end. The king’s mobi- lization of Wynnere reconciles the core concerns of the text: the relationship between expenditure and the generation of new wealth.32 In the poem the French wars are to generate both land and capital: the proud palace of Paris comes under English rule, and gold and silver are to be won and distributed among Edward’s followers. As Turville-Petre has noted, this promise would have had particular pertinence in the years following Edward’s 1346 attempt to take Paris, when the king tempted investors in his high-cost campaign with the promise of the city’s riches (and it is this same promise we presumably find reflected in Minot’s verses concerning this campaign).33 In Wynnere and Wastoure (as for Minot), this ambition is endorsed by a familiar prophecy of the age. This is not, as has commonly been understood, a comment on the wastefulness or moral decadence of the wars, but rather an endorsement of them and a prophetic ratification. The conclusion of Wynnere and Wastoure (as it stands) draws Wynnere into a new positive and nationally productive context, reconciling investment with reward.

Historical/Prophetic Structuring and the Prologue The political orientation of the poem’s conclusion (as it survives) holds significant ramifications for our understanding of the better-noted prophetic material incorporated in its prologue. The prophetically-inflected jingoism of its conclusion suggests that we need to reconsider the apparent pessimism of its opening lines. In fact, both can be understood as part of a single, coherent prophetic structure particular to this period. The most oft-noted prophetic borrowing in the prologue is from material elsewhere attributed to the Scottish border prophet Thomas of Erceldoune:

When wawes waxen schall wilde and walles bene doun And hares appon herthe-stones schall hurcle in hire fourme

31. Thorlac Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival of the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, U.K., 1977), 3–4; and Thomas L. Reed Jr., Middle English Debate Poetry and the Aesthetics of Irresolution (Columbia, Mo., 1990), 262. 32. Bryant has understood this final sequence as the ideal parliamentary compromise, under the auspice of the king, between winning and wasting (“Talking with the Taxman,” 245–46). 33. Thorlac Turville-Petre, ed., Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages: An Anthology (London, 1989), 65.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 437 07/03/15 10:50 AM 438 The Chaucer Review

And eke boyes of blode with boste and with pryde Schall wedde ladyes in londe and lede hem at will, Thene dredfull domesdaye it draweth neghe aftir. (12–16)

This is a partial quotation from one of the earliest known prophetic texts attributed to Thomas, “Thomas de Essedoune’s Reply,” preserved in Harley 2253. Although it appears in a Ludlow manuscript, the text itself retains resid- ual northern linguistic features and is concerned with Anglo-Scottish border affairs:

When man as mad a kyng of a capped man; When mon is levere othermones thyng then is owen; When Londyon ys forest, ant forest ys felde: When hares kendles o the herston; When wyt and wille werres togedere; When mon makes stables of kyrkes, and steles castles wyth styes; When Rokesbourh nys no burgh ant market is at Forweleye; When the alde is gan ant the newe is come that don notht; When Bambourne is donged wyth dede men; When men ledes men in ropes to buyen and to sellen; When a quarter of whaty whete is chaunged for a colt of ten markes; When prude pikes and pees is leyd in prisoun; When a Scot ne may hym hude ase hare in forme that the Englysshe ne shal hym fynde; When rytht ant wrong ascenteth to-gedere; When laddes weddeth lovedis; When Scottes flen so faste that for faute of ship hy drouneth hem-selve— Whenne shal this be? Nouther in thine tyme ne in myne. Ah comen and gon with-inne twenty wynter ant on.34

This material was deeply influential, and, as Salter suggests, it might have been known to William Langland and influenced the prophetic tone of Reason’s

34. The text of the prophecy is taken from the transcription in James M. Dean, ed., Medieval English Political Writings (Kalamazoo, 1996), 11.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 438 07/03/15 10:50 AM victoria flood 439

sermon in Piers Plowman B-Text.35 Although it is generally accepted that in his re-use of Erceldoune material the Wynnere poet constructed a national and political field of vision, the pessimism assumed to be in place here is by no means necessarily a given.36 This borrowing from the “Reply” has hitherto been understood as establishing a framework of political complaint, a vehicle for satire, and even a challenge to accepted political orthodoxies.37 However, in its original context, the “Reply” was by no means a straightforward complaint of the age. It is not simply a sequence of catastrophes, but instead a sequence of catastrophes presented prior to the accession of Edward III.38 It moves from the reign of Edward II (the fool king of the first line), whose reign brings famine—the rising price of wheat—and military defeat—the disastrous battle of Bannockburn (“When Bambourne is donged wyth dede men”)—to a new time of English victories in Scotland. The prophecy concludes with the battle of Halidon Hill, at which the Scottish force was chased into the sea.39 This was Edward III’s first military victory. TheWynnere poet made use of this paradigm in his own particular vision of social disarray. This is not limited to the prologue: the relationship of the “Reply” to the various complaints and abuses perpetrated by Wynnere and Wastoure across the text has been noted by scholars.40 Combined with material from the influential and long-lived apocalyptic sequence, Fifteen Signs before Doomsday (the rising of the sea, the falling of walls), the use of the Erceldoune borrowings in the prologue provides an appropriate introduction to the moral and social disorders explored in the poem, a world turned upside-down.41 However, this vision of chaos does not remain unredeemed in the structure of the poem as a whole, for the total schema at work in the “Reply” also underlies Wynnere and Wastoure. In its incomplete conclusion, the poem brings Wynnere and Wastoure under the control of an English

35. Elizabeth Salter, “Piers Plowman and ‘The Simonie,’” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 203 (1966): 241–54, at 253–54. 36. Bestul, Satire and Allegory, 62; and Scattergood, “Winner and Waster,” 45. 37. Bestul, Satire and Allegory, 43–44, 60–62; Scattergood, “Winner and Waster,” 45; and Turville-Petre, “The Prologue of Wynnere and Wastoure,” Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 18 (1987): 19–29, at 24. 38. For a fuller discussion, see Victoria Flood, “Imperfect Apocalypse: Thomas of Erceldoune’s Reply to the Countess of Dunbar in MS Harley 2253,” Marginalia (Oct. 2010): 11–27 (online at http://www.marginalia.co.uk/journal/10apocalypse). The movement in this prophecy from disorder to order is also noted by Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 99. 39. Brie, ed., The Brut, 1:287. 40. On the relationship to the “Reply” of various complaints and abuses perpetrated by Wynnere and Wastoure, see Reed, Middle English Debate Poetry, 280. 41. See W. W. Heist, The Fifteen Signs before Doomsday (East Lansing, Mich., 1952); and Catherine McKenna, “Fifteen Signs before Doomsday,” in Patrick K. Ford, ed., Celtic Folklore and Christianity: Studies in Memory of William W. Heist (Santa Barbara, 1983), 84–112.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 439 07/03/15 10:50 AM 440 The Chaucer Review

king who will achieve great military conquests. In this respect, the Wynnere poet’s use of the “Reply” in the prologue intersects with his use of the Six Kings in the conclusion. The “Reply” operates in line with the same prin- ciple as the Six Kings, which was first and foremost a mode of historical commentary. This is certainly how the Six Kings was read by the author of the Anglo-Norman Brut, who enthusiastically applied the prophecy to events of the reigns of Henry III, Edward I, and—with particular relish—the perceived evils of Edward II’s reign.42 The uses of the boar during the reign of Edward III must be understood as an extension of this movement. The Six Kings stages a transition from the calamities of the reign of the goat, Edward II, in whose time England suffers great sorrow, famine, death, and loss of territory (“grant damage famine et mortalite des gentz et perte de terre”), to the heroic age of the boar, Edward III. Like Wynnere and Wastoure, both texts trace a passage from general social and cosmic disorder to the restoration of royal order and military victory. Political prophecy is put to use by the Wynnere poet not as isolated borrowings but rather as part of a coherent structure, indicative of a particular contemporary understanding of insular history in the age of Edward III as it emerged from the dark days of Edward II. This movement into a new age of prosperity is at the very foundation of the Wynnere poet’s conceptualization of recent history. I am not the first to detect this pat- tern. Thomas Reed has similarly understood the poem, as it progresses from its apocalyptic prologue to the king’s reply to the two debaters, to be a movement through disorder to a new state of royal orderliness.43 For Reed, the poem is a call to judgment within an apocalyptic, even millenarian, context, and the judgment exercised by the king is the only thing standing between contemporary English society and the arrival of Antichrist.44 However, this critical understanding of fourteenth-century English apocalypticism relates to a paradigm not present in the Wynnere poet’s source traditions, from which the arrival of Antichrist and the Last Judgment are notably absent. When considering the apocalypticism of the Wynnere poet, we need to look to a different eschatological framework, associated with the boar of Windsor. The boar was conventionally identified throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the Last World Emperor, a figure of sibylline prophecy who was to win the Holy Cross and unite Christendom as the final act of human history before the arrival of

42. Compare the English translation, in Brie, ed., The Brut, 1:177–78, 203–5, 243–47. 43. Reed, Middle English Debate Poetry, 273. 44. Reed, Middle English Debate Poetry, 289–92.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 440 07/03/15 10:50 AM victoria flood 441

Antichrist.45 Thise schatological dimension is grounded in the extension of the English empire of the Six Kings to the conquest of Jerusalem, a movement conventionally associated with the winning of the Holy Cross and universal conversion. In the Six Kings and its derivatives, the concluding events of this sequence are always omitted: there is no Antichrist, and no Last Judgment. Indeed, we might note that in the Six Kings itself history continues: three kings follow the boar, even if these are generally forgotten in later works in which the boar and his journey to Jerusalem appear. As a general rule, the English political prophetic tradition cultivates a decid- edly secularized schema, which stops short of full eschatological development: the Last Judgment is always deferred. In its use of political prophecy, Wynnere and Wastoure is no exception. Although it opens with an allusion to Doomsday, it is unlikely that the complete poem would actually have continued that far. Although this framework of allusion contains some religious resonances, here the imperial movement is emphasized over and above any particular presentiment of history’s end. Nonetheless, as the Last World Emperor, the boar was a powerful political signifier in a prophetic tradition that claimed a central place for Edward III and his French campaigns in the drama of universal history. In this regard, we can understand the element of divine ratification that on occa- sion accompanies allusions to this prophetic motif. In the 1346 Invective, we read of the boar’s conquest of Paris (again lifted from the Six Kings) in pre- cisely these terms:

Dentibus aprinis infertur mors Parisinis; Sunt dentes tuti, mundi, fortes et acuti. Apro vivente, prudenter regna regente, Anglia dat lumen, dum Deus apri dat acumen.

45. Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York, 1979), 44; Paul Alexander, “Byzantium and the Migration of Literary Works and Motifs: The Legend of the Last Roman Emperor,” Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 2 (1971): 47–68; P. J. Alexander, “The Medieval Legend of the Last Roman Emperor and Its Messianic Origin,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insitutes 41 (1978): 1–15; Marjorie Reeves, “Joachimist Influences on the Idea of a Last World Emperor,” Traditio 17 (1961): 323–70 (repr. Delno C. West, ed., Joachim of Fiore in Christian Thought, 2 vols. [New York, 1975], 2:511–58); Marjorie Reeves, “The Development of Apocalyptic Thought: Medieval Attitudes,” in C. A. Patrides and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, eds., The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents, and Repercussions (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), 40–72, at 45; and Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, 2nd edn. (London, 1993), 30–33.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 441 07/03/15 10:50 AM 442 The Chaucer Review

Death is inflicted on Paris by the boar’s tusks; the tusks are secure, clean, strong, and sharp. By the living boar, ruling the kingdom wisely, England gives light, while God gives sharpness [or cunning] to the boar.46

In Wynnere and Wastoure, Edward III’s reign appears similarly as a historical culmination. The Wynnere poet takes in the full scope of legendary insular history, from the moment of national foundation to the reign of the boar. The widely noted allusion to the fall of Troy and the foundation of Britain in the prologue to Wynnere and Wastoure (lines 1–2), like similar material in the opening of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (lines 1–4), is suggestive of a very specific Galfridian national historical model, and (as Turville-Petre has noted) provides a fitting beginning for a work engaged with national affairs.47 Yet more than that is at work here: the poem is grounded in an understanding of a continuous history stretching from Brutus the first British king, to Edward the last. The poem opens with a vision of the very beginning of insular history in Brutus, and ends with its fullest realization in Edward III. A very specific secularized eschatological system is in place, in which prophecy is fulfilled but history itself is never transcended. For the author of Wynnere and Wastoure, political prophecy was by no means a marker of an oppositional discourse. It was a valid form of present- ing political, and more general cultural, principles and perspectives that were essentially conservative, invested in the imperial prowess of Edward III. A notable exception to this outlook is the Prophecies of John of Bridlington, understood by Thomas Bestul (problematically) to be an illuminating com- parison to Wynnere and Wastoure.48 Bridlington circulated alongside a commentary by John Erghome, a canon of the Augustine Priory at Bridlington, during the late 1360s, and it has been understood by a number of scholars to be Erghome’s own composition.49 The Bridlington author expresses considerable disillusionment with the cost and dwindling success of Edward III’s French wars, casting the king as, by turn, avaricious and prodigal. This depic- tion accords with a common complaint in political literature from the late 1360s and 70s concerning the corruption and moral decadence of the king and

46. Wright, ed., Political Poems and Songs, 28. 47. Turville-Petre, “The Prologue of Wynnere and Wastoure,” 23. 48. Bestul, Satire and Allegory, 62–64. 49. Wright, ed., Political Poems and Songs, 1:123–215; and Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England II, c.1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century (New York, 1982), 59. For an overview of the arguments surrounding the prophecy’s authorship, see A. G. Rigg, “John of Bridlington’s Prophecy: A New Look,” Speculum 63 (1988): 596–613.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 442 07/03/15 10:50 AM victoria flood 443

his court. In many respects, this was a recycling of oppositional paradigms applied earlier to Edward II. But the historical context of this is not the one to which Wynnere and Wastoure belongs. The Wynnere poet does not appear to share the Bridlington author’s anxiety about Edward’s proclivity to sin, and, furthermore, his single reference to the French campaigns rests on a network of intertextual allusions that are fundamentally laudatory. It has strong claims to be an earlier composition than Bridlington, and the product of a very different political climate. In political prophetic or prophetically-inflected works from across the period, rarely is the English claim to France totally rejected. Even as he wrote during the disillusionment of the later years of Edward’s reign, the Bridlington author remained seduced by the image of a prophetically-ratified English king on the French throne. Bridlington replaces the international prowess of Edward III with that of his son the Black Prince, who is cast in the image of his father, claiming as his inheritance “regni Franciae et regnum Angliae, transibunt ad gallum; quia gallus vocabitur Edwardus rex, sicut pater ejus prius vocabatur” (the kingdom of France and the kingdom of England, they will go over to the cock; because the cock will be called King Edward like his father earlier was called).50 The prophetic vision of an English king on the French throne died late, and this passage takes its terms, self-consciously, from expectations previously associated with Edward III, now reborn in Edward of Woodstock. We must orientate this sequence in the broader context of the same prophetic tradition that we have noted in works of the 1330s, 40s, and 50s, which in the 60s transferred from Edward to his son. English political prophecy of Edward’s reign was not nearly as radical as scholars have previously supposed. An understanding of Wynnere and Wastoure as an oppositional text depends entirely on reading its final imperial vision as ironic, and the main body of the poem as a veiled royal allegory, but even when allegorized, medieval literary political critique was rarely so deeply coded as this. There is no direct expression of antipathy toward the king in the poem, and if the poet was engaged in an attack on royal economic policy, he did so remarkably opaquely. Wynnere and Wastoure stands in stark contrast to works such as De speculo regis Edwardi III by Simon Islip (d. 1366), keeper of the Privy Seal and later Archbishop of Canterbury, where the king is identified as “depopulator rei publicae et destructor regni” (plunderer of the common weal and destroyer

50. Wright, ed., Political Poems and Songs, 1:204–5.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 443 07/03/15 10:50 AM 444 The Chaucer Review

of the kingdom).51 This is a text we can orientate historically and politically closer to Bridlington than Wynnere and Wastoure. In a similar vein, in Piers Plowman B-Text, composed about a year after Edward’s death, Langland ret- rospectively considers the French wars of Edward’s reign as an undertaking where much was hazarded for the distant promise of a material reward that remained unrealized. In Passus 3, Lady Mede identifies herself, rather than Conscience, as the chief ally of the king in his French campaigns:52

In Normandie was he noght noyed for my sake— Ac thow thiself [Conscience], soothly, shamedest hym ofte: ...... I made his men murye and mournynge lette; I batred hem on the bak and boldede hir hertes, And dide hem hoppe for hope to have me at wille. Hadde I ben marchal of his men, by Marie of hevene! I dorste have leyd my lif and no lasse wedde, He sholde have be lord of that lond in lengthe and in brede. (B.3.189–90, 198–203)

In setting Mede among Edward’s followers, Langland may well have had in mind the promise of gold and silver in the king’s command to Wynnere. Even though for Langland, as for the Bridlington author, history had not borne out the promise of the boar, there is no reason to doubt that, for the Wynnere poet, this future was still full of possibility.

Fifteenth-Century Prophetic Contexts This future remained compelling for prophetically-inclined commentators into the fifteenth century, and the persistence of this vision may well account for the survival of Wynnere and Wastoure into this period. Although the factors that informed Thornton’s acquaintance with the text were surely myriad,53 there may have been a political dimension to the copying of Wynnere and Wastoure in the mid-fifteenth century. Imperial visions

51. Alongside Bridlington, Scattergood has understood this to be an instructive analogue to Wynnere and Wastoure (“Winner and Waster,” 48). However, there is no clear line of influence or common framework of allusions between the two poems. 52. A. V. C. Schmidt, ed., The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text (London, 1995). 53. Potentially including economic interests: after all, he was a tax collector. See Bryant, “Talking with the Taxman,” 224.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 444 07/03/15 10:50 AM victoria flood 445

of Edward III’s kingship were in vogue during this period, and prophetic motifs identified with the old king were applied successively to a number of kings and their challengers. The uses of the prophecy during the deposition of Edward’s grandson Richard II and in the anti-Lancastrian rebel- lions of the early fifteenth century are well-noted.54 The boar was adopted as a Lancastrian symbol from the very beginning of the Lancastrian regime: according to the Chronicle of Thomas of Otterburn, in 1339 Henry IV identified himself as a boar in the fashion of his grandfather.55 Into the civil unrest of the midcentury, the boar continued to figure prominently in prophetic texts—a feature of prophecies composed among both factions in the Wars of the Roses, for both the Lancastrian and Yorkist claimants traced their royal right back to Edward. This symbol reappeared with particular urgency in the reign of Henry IV’s grandson Henry VI, during a time when England’s French territories lay under threat. The boar is identified with Henry VI on two occasions in the prophecies preserved in London, British Library Cotton Roll II.23, a collection of materials associated with Jack Cade’s Revolt of 1450. Many items in the collection, both prophetic and nonprophetic, express an anxiety about the policies of the king’s advisers regarding the cession of French territory, and urge the king to renew campaigns in France. This hope is connected with the boar in the dice prophecy When Sonday Gooth (of which the text is damaged) and in Prophecy Professid. Ascribed to Merlin and the Sibyl, Prophecy Professid traces the activities of the Lancastrian boar, identified as Henry VI, who recovers lands in France as part of a program of pan-European domi- nation that includes France and Spain and extends to Jerusalem, prior to an imperial journey to Germany:56

ffro wyndesore shall he come Whetyng his tuskes by diuers londes ffull doughtyly to deme in dome All þo agayn his riʒt þat stonde he shall þen gede with mony a gome þat are full hend and harty of honde

54. For discussion of the variant versions of the Six Kings from this period, see Smallwood, “The Prophecy of the Six Kings.” For its fifteenth-century applications, see also Helen Fulton, “Arthurian Prophecy and the Deposition of Richard II,” Arthurian Literature 22 (2005): 64–83. 55. Caroline Eckhardt, ed., The “Prophetia Merlini” of Geoffrey of Monmouth: A Fifteenth- Century English Commentary (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 31. 56. A variant version of this prophecy from the same period is found in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales Peniarth MS 50, pp. 221–26.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 445 07/03/15 10:50 AM 446 The Chaucer Review

luffesom on lase to be left in londe Bothe by see and eke by sonde he shall passe þer by Aragon lond And so þorow spayn off mykell myght Burgwyne and berne both bynd in hande And ffraunnce shall be ffull sore affright Jerusalem þat gentill town Shall be vnto þe bore so bold And rome most riall of renown Shall to our speche ffully ffold To Germany he shall hym bown as most myghtiest on þe mold þer to be crowneth wt a crowne ffull gay glittyng all in gold (lines 205–24; my transcription)

Instead of imagining the the boar’s death, this text imagines his coronation in Germany as, presumably, a Holy Roman Emperor, in a variation on the theme of the fourteenth-century prophecy. The text cannot be understood as one of the English translations of the Six Kings: it is not a verbatim reworking of the older prophecy or a wholesale borrowing from any of its later variant versions. Rather, it is a new prophecy that reimagines the imperial career of the boar in line with a new political context. The source traditions of Wynnere and Wastoure remained useful to political commentators a century after their composition, and the continued poltical utility of this material may well be an important part of the puzzle of the poem’s survival. Cotton Roll II.23 stands roughly contemporary to the compilation of the Lincoln and London Thornton manuscripts. Although Robert Thornton’s own political sympathies during this troubled period remain uncertain,57 he was clearly interested in similar contemporary prophetic representations of kingship, of a type with the boar. The Lincoln Thornton manuscript provides the earliest witness of the late-fourteenth-century Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune, a text in the northern English jingoist tradition that

57. Thornton has been connected to a number of Yorkshire gentry and aristocratic house- holds, but any involvement in the factionalism of this period remains uncertain. See George R. Keiser, “Lincoln Cathedral MS 91: Life and Milieu of the Scribe,” Studies in Bibliography 32 (1979), 158–79, and “More Light on the Life and Milieu of Robert Thornton,” Studies in Bibliography 36 (1983): 111–19; and Michael Johnston, “A New Document Relating to the Life of Robert Thornton,” The Library 8 (2007): 304–13.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 446 07/03/15 10:50 AM victoria flood 447

goes back to the “Reply.” The Romance concludes with the im perial career of a hero named the bastard (the precise meaning behind which remains obscure), who, like the boar, conquers Europe and Jerusalem. Although at the end of his conquests the bastard is buried in Jehoshaphat rather than Cologne, he is without doubt based on the boar. In Cock in the North, an early-fifteenth-century prophecy derived from the Romance, the dead man (a figure based on the bastard) is explicitly identified as the boar: “þe said bore shall wynne ye beme [holy cross] .” 58 Although the account of the bastard’s international career is damaged in the Lincoln Thornton manuscript, it was almost certainly a part of the text as it was originally known to Thornton. It appears in a witness of the prophecy held to be closely related to the Thornton text, in Cambridge University Library MS Ff.5.48 (ca. 1480):

Þe bastarde shal get hym power strong, And alle his foes he shall doune dyng; Off alle þe v kyngus landis, Þer shal non bad [word] home bryng. Þe bastard shal dye in þe holy land. (lines 6ʒ7–41)59

The incomplete conclusion to Wynnere and Wastoure offers a similar vision of English supremacy. Notably, the poem was compiled by Thornton alongside texts depicting imperial prowess and empire-building. The London Thornton manuscript also contains a carol on Henry V’s Agincourt campaign, and three crusading romances, among them a romance of Richard I’s exploits in the Holy Land.60 The relationship of this material to Christian history is never far from the surface. The manuscript also includes the Three Kings of Cologne, a tale about the Three Magi, concluding with the interment of their bodies at Cologne Cathedral. Wynnere and Wastoure is concerned, of course, with Edward III’s journey to this same shrine. Cologne had an important place in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English understandings of universal

58. Rossell Hope Robbins, ed., Historical Poems of the XIV and XV Centuries (New York, 1959), 15–17, 309–12. 59. James A. H. Murray, ed., The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune Printed from Five Manuscripts, EETS o.s. 61 (London, 1875), 43. See also Alois Brandl, Thomas of Erceldoune (Berlin, 1880); and Ingeborg Nixon, ed., Thomas of Erceldoune, 2 vols. (Copenhagen, 1983). 60. For the contents, see Susanna Fein, “The Contents of Robert Thornton’s Manuscripts,” in Susanna Fein and Michael Johnston, eds., Robert Thornton and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts (York, 2014), 13–65, at 48–60; and John J. Thompson, Robert Thornton and the London Thornton Manuscript: British Library MS Additional 31042 (Cambridge, U.K., 1987), 10–18.

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 447 07/03/15 10:50 AM 448 The Chaucer Review

history and its localized political implications: both as the resting place of the Magi and the final chapter in the career of the prophesied boar.

Conclusion Wynnere and Wastoure is an important case study for our understanding of the significance of prophecy for the analysis of political poetry. Although not conceived of as a prophecy, in its very conception the poem is prophetically engaged. In Wynnere and Wastoure, prophetic borrowings govern a clear set of historical and historicizing elements centered on the figure of the English king. A reassessment of the Wynnere poet’s use of prophetic source traditions allows us to locate him and his work within a clearer historical and political context. Furthermore, recognition of its prophetic allusions affects the way we read the text, revealing an underlying triumphal structure, its apparent pessimism a species of jingoistic optimism. The Wynnere poet both articulates and resolves complaint through an imagining of an English victory in France that balances investment with expenditure to the profit of all who are faithful to the king. In framing this assertion, the Wynnere poet made use of an influential political discourse with a long-lived place in English literary political culture, and this might have provided one mechanism for its survival into the following century in the London Thornton manuscript. The poem remains, nonetheless, an important document of a particular historical period, born from a time when great expectations were vested in Edward III and the political imaginings of an English empire spanning Europe.

Phillips-Universität Marburg Marburg, Germany ( [email protected])

CR 49.4_03_Flood.indd 448 07/03/15 10:50 AM