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Verba Vana: Empty Words in Ricardian London Volume I

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Verba Vana: Empty Words in Ricardian London Volume I Verba Vana: Empty Words in Ricardian London Volume I Robert Ellis Thesis presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2012 School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London 2 vols 1 Declaration I hereby declare that the material presented in this thesis is my own. ................................................. Word count: 99,999 2 Abstract Verba Vana, or ‘empty words’, are named as among the defining features of London by a late fourteenth-century Anglo-Latin poem which itemises the properties of seven English cities. This thesis examines the implications of this description; it explores, in essence, what it meant to live, work, and especially write, in an urban space notorious for the vacuity of its words. The thesis demonstrates that anxieties concerning the notoriety of empty words can be detected in a wide variety of surviving urban writings produced in the 1380s and 1390s. These include anxieties not only about idle talk – such as janglynge, slander, and other sins of the tongue – but also about the deficiencies of official discourses which are partisan, fragmentary and susceptible to contradiction and revision. This thesis explores these anxieties over the course of four discrete chapters. Chapter one, focusing on Letter-Book H, Richard Maidstone’s Concordia and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale, considers how writers engaged with the urban power struggles that were played out on Cheapside. Chapter two, examining the 1388 Guild Petitions, considers how the London guilds legitimised their textual endeavours and argues that the famous Mercers’ Petition is a translation of the hitherto-ignored Embroiderers’ Petition. Chapter three, looking at several works by Chaucer, John Gower, the Monk of Westminster and various urban officials, explores the discursive space that emerges following justified and unjustified executions. Chapter four, focusing on Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and John Clanvowe’s Boke of Cupide, contends that the crises of speech and authority that these poems dramatise can be productively read within the context of the Merciless Parliament of 1388. Through close textual analysis, this thesis analyses specific responses to the prevalence of empty words in the city, while also reflecting more 3 broadly on the remarkable cultural, linguistic, social, and political developments witnessed in this period. 4 Contents Volume I Declaration ................................................................................................................... 2 Abstract ........................................................................................................................ 3 List of Tables................................................................................................................ 8 List of Figures .............................................................................................................. 9 List of Abbreviations.................................................................................................. 10 Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................... 11 Notes on Quotations and Appendices ........................................................................ 13 A Prelude: The Variable Fortunes of Nicholas Exton .......................................... 14 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 16 1. ‘Chepp, stupha, Coklana’: Ricardian Cheapside and Urban Power Struggles .................................................................................................................................... 31 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 31 Conceptualising Late Fourteenth-Century Cheapside ........................................ 35 ‘[T]am tubis & fistulis ducatur per Chepe’ (4.3): Order and Transparency in Letter-Book H ...................................................................................................... 46 ‘[I]nsurreccionem congregaciones & conuenticule’ (5.2): Sir Nicholas Brembre’s Anti-Associational Rhetoric .............................................................. 54 ‘Mediam dum rex venit usque plateam’ (275): Mediation in Richard Maidstone’s Concordia ....................................................................................... 64 ‘For whan ther any ridyng was in Chepe/Out of the shoppe thider wolde he lepe’ (I.4377-78): Conflict Irresolution in Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale .............................. 78 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 93 2. ‘[D]olium, leo verbaque vana’: Strategies of Legitimation in the 1388 Guild Petitions ..................................................................................................................... 95 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 95 The 1388 Guild Petitions: Context and Form ..................................................... 99 Group One: Modelling Petitions ....................................................................... 110 Group Two: Expanding Models ........................................................................ 120 Group Three: Experimentations with Language, Rhetoric, and Voice ............. 123 Recontextualising the Mercers’ Petition: The Mercers as Translators ............. 127 5 Analysing the Mercers’ Petition: The Mercers as Innovators .......................... 133 The Language of Petitioning: A Second Mercers’ Petition .............................. 137 Preliminary Conclusions ................................................................................... 141 ‘[O]ue graunt noyse’: Strategies of Legitimation ............................................. 143 Conclusion: Verba Superflua ............................................................................ 154 3. ‘Lancea cum scutis’: Language and Violence in Exemplary Narratives and Historical Records .................................................................................................. 156 Introduction ....................................................................................................... 156 The Rest is Never Silence: Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale and Questions of Doubt ........................................................................................................................... 158 ‘Hold conseil and descoevere it noght’ (III.779): Gower’s ‘Tale of Phebus and Cornide’ and the Triumphing of Silence........................................................... 162 Gower’s ‘Tale of Phebus and Cornide’ in Context ........................................... 166 ‘This thing is knowen overal’ (III.1893): Gower’s ‘Tale of Orestes’ and the Fame of Death ................................................................................................... 174 ‘Diverse opinion ther is’ (III.2114): Clytemnestra’s Death and Orestes’s Shame ........................................................................................................................... 180 ‘[T]ho befell a wonder thing’ (III.2172): Gower’s Women and the Problems of Tale-Telling ....................................................................................................... 187 Gower’s ‘Tale of Orestes’ in Context: The Many Lives and Deaths of Clytemnestra ..................................................................................................... 192 The Life, Death, and Afterlives of John Constantyn, Cordwainer ................... 199 ‘[U]t volunt quidam’: Constantyn, the Westminster Chronicle, and the Spread of Public Speech .................................................................................................... 210 Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 219 4. ‘[P]ira pomaque regia thronus’: Judging Speech in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and Clanvowe’s Boke of Cupide ............................................................................ 220 Introduction ....................................................................................................... 220 ‘[S]he brast on forto wepe’ (Boke of Cupide, 210): Competitive Speechifying ........................................................................................................................... 223 ‘[A]l that euere he wol he may’ (Boke of Cupide, 16): The Failures of Regal Authority ........................................................................................................... 240 ‘[W]hat may been youre help?’ (V.459): Supplanting Monarchs .................... 250 ‘[W]ith that song I awoke’ (Boke of Cupide, 290): Revisiting the Aesthetics of Irresolution ........................................................................................................ 263 ‘I can for tene sey not oon worde more’ (209): The Boke of Cupide and the Politics of Irresolution ....................................................................................... 269 6 ‘[Y]e get namoore of me’ (V.343): Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and the Politics of Irresolution ........................................................................................................ 275 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 288 Volume II Appendices
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