Vernacular Literature and Current Affairs in the Early Sixteenth Century

France, England and Scotland

Jennifer Britnell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351763790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This title was first published in 2000: The printed writings of the most important authors of the sixteenth century are characterised by frequent references to current affairs. This collection brings together essays by literary scholars and historians of the era to discuss various ways in which those writing in the vernacular during the early sixteenth century responded to contemporary events. The papers in this volume also demonstrate how the spread of literacy was of fundamental significance for the economics of book production, and for ways in which political power was exercised and expressed, as well as for the development of new literary forms of critical and occasional writing.

Chapter 1

John Skelton and the royal court

Greg Walker

That John Skelton (c. 1460–1528) was in one sense or another a ‘court poet’ has been the corner stone of most accounts of his life and work.¹ But quite what that phrase implies is not always immediately clear. As what follows will suggest, the early modern court was a complex and amorphous phenomenon: a mansion of many rooms. Consequently the notion of ‘court’ or ‘courtly’ poetry needs to be treated with care if it is to be of value for an understanding of Skelton’s career. This essay will examine Skelton’s engagements with the royal court, both in his poetry and during his career as a writer and scholar, as he gained and lost royal favour and the place close to the centre of political affairs that such favour brought with it. In the small space available here it will not be possible to offer detailed readings of all the relevant texts, but it should be possible to offer suggestions for future research and reflections upon the ‘courtly’ context of the poet’s work. We will begin, however, with a brief account of the early Tudor court itself, which demonstrates the need for caution and clarity when discussing even such seemingly uncontentious questions as: what were the limits of the court?, who had a place there? and who could claim to influence its culture?

The royal court

At the centre of the early Tudor court was, of course, the royal household, divided into two main departments, the domus regiae magnificenciae (the chamber), and the domus providencie (the hall).² The former, under the authority of the lord chamberlain, provided the material comforts for the king’s magnificent lifestyle and organized the routine and protocol of daily life in the royal palaces. The latter, under the lord steward, provided the materials and administrative support to make all this possible. The staff of these household departments, their officers, gentlemen, yeomen, grooms, and servants might legitimately claim to be members of the court, as could other groups and individuals, including members of the council and the royal secretaries, who enjoyed ‘bouge of courte’ and the right to dine in the king’s hall as members of his extended familia. Beyond these individuals with a formal place at court, there were numerous others, from the king’s boon companions who enjoyed the privilege of dining with him in his privy chambers, through his distinguished guests, the ambassadors and representatives of friendly and not so friendly neighbours, the petitioners and suitors from among his own subjects, to tradesmen, craftsmen and labourers, poets, musicians, and entertainers, the servants of servants and the counsellors of counsellors, ‘boys, varlets, vagabonds’ and other hangers-on, who all frequented the corridors and rooms of the palaces with or without tasks to perform or good reason to be there.

The spatial confines of the royal palaces provide, then, one useful and concrete measure of the dimensions of the court, even if the numerous ordinances and injunctions against the encroachments of superfluous servants and attendants, wastrels, and ne’er-do-wells suggest that its boundaries were remarkably porous. But it must be remembered that the composition of the royal household itself did not remain fixed. At holiday and festival times its numbers expanded to prodigious size, absorbing many of the marginal groups and individuals already mentioned into its festive activities, only to withdraw its embrace once more as it contracted to its workaday dimensions after Easter or Twelfth Night, or when it shrank to the still more restricted ‘riding household’ that accompanied the king on his summer perambulations. But any comprehensive account of court life and culture needs to take note of a still wider context than the household and palace. There were those departments and institutions which were formerly part of the household, but which had migrated ‘out of court’ in the course of the later medieval period. Among these, the offices of the Great Wardrobe, the King’s Works, the Ordnance, and the Chapel Royal, their officers and staff, were all clearly part of the ambit of the court, subject to its pressures and demands, and contributory to its culture and politics. Beyond these were those distinctly non-courtly institutions which nonetheless had a close symbiotic relationship with the royal household and the monarch: the law courts at Westminster, and the inns of court in London, parliament when it was in session at Westminster, Westminster Abbey itself, its monks, priests, chaplains, choristers, and sanctuary men and its numerous service departments, and the nearby city of London, with its own hierarchy of offices, councils, courts, and guilds. Even though such institutions cannot be described as part of the court, the realities of geography and demography meant that they exerted an influence upon it, and contributed for better or worse to its culture. In a society where almost all of the governmental functions of the crown, the capital, and the archdiocese of Canterbury, took place in an area no larger that a modest provincial town, it was inevitable that informal contacts, pressures, tensions, and negotiations brought the whole of metropolitan elite society into close contact.

Defining the court broadly as those circles centred upon, but considerably wider than, the royal household, in which the king and his counsellors moved and operated, is then, a useful starting point. In that arena views might be expressed with the hope of influencing the king, either directly or through the offices of those around him. But those who might express such views were not all ‘courtiers’ in any meaningful sense. Ideas, information, formal gifts and informal favours, material profits: the multifarious currencies of patronage might all circulate within this vast, organic, courtly ecosystem, linking those within the inner sanctum of the privy chamber with those in the chamber beyond it, and those within the household to those without. In such a society one did not have to be a member of the sovereign’s immediate entourage – or even of the royal household – to have access to aspects of court culture, and to contribute to that culture in turn.

Skelton spent the majority of his life on the fringes of the royal palaces, around the household but not of it, alternating (as he became more or less useful to those with power and influence) between those groups with access to the sovereign and those without it. Yet his poetic output remained (apart from during his period in Diss) consistent in its focus upon the monarch and his court. The great majority of his writings were intended to influence the king in one way or another, whether to persuade him towards or against a particular policy, or simply to attract his attention and win favour (or, more often than not, to do both at once). Even during the (long) periods when he was outside the household, the poet was writing with at least one eye upon a courtly audience. Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?, which focused in large part upon the grievances of the citizens of London (and addressed them directly in an apostrophe) also envisaged a readership among noblemen and those knowledgeable about the rise and fall of personal fortunes in the royal palaces, as the inclusion of allusions to the fate of the king’s French Secretary, Jean Meautis, suggests.³ The proximity of all the interconnected reading communities in and around London and Westminster meant that, as John Scattergood has shown, Skelton’s manuscripts as well as his printed texts could address a variety of different publics.⁴

Lawrence Manley has recently provided a perceptive account of the functions of literary culture in the capital in this period: ‘The volume of printed works … was only part of a much wider field of discourse and debate. The large number of manuscript complaints suggests that the genre circulated widely, as memoranda at the top of the pyramid, as clandestine protest at the bottom’.⁵ The manuscript reception of Skelton’s Speke Parott shows, not only that this is a shrewd assessment of the functions of satire and complaint in early modern society, but that a single text might fulfil different functions for different readers. Addressed to Henry VIII and the community of gentlemen and scholars at court as a coded critique of Wolsey’s negotiations at the Calais Conference of August-November 1521, Skelton’s satire was also copied down by the London grocer and bookseller John Colyns, and added to the collection of other anti-Wolsey complaints, expressive of Londoners’ economic and religious grievances, in his commonplace book. What, for Speke Parott’s courtly readers, was a memorandum for internal consumption among the ruling elite, expressive of courtly rivalries and coterie academic feuds, was evidently, for Colyns, a public complaint against the excesses of foreign policy, taxation, and the legal system under Wolsey’s administration. The fact that Colyns did not copy into his book those sections of the poem directed against the spread of humanist Greek studies in the universities demonstrates the discrimination with which such texts were received, even towards the base of Manly’s social pyramid.⁶

To divide Skelton’s writings into those which are ‘courtly’ and those which are not is, then, a potentially unhelpful exercise. Almost all of the poems written outside of the Diss period (and even some of those written during it) were in one way or another ‘courtly’, in that they sought to address issues, or influence individuals of importance in or around the court. It is necessary to be more discriminating and to see whereabouts within the courtly-metropolitan ecosystem each particular text found its occasion and point of purchase, if its full significance is to be appreciated. Before turning to the realities of Skelton’s patronage, however, it is valuable to look briefly at the way that courts are examined in the poet’s own work, to gain an insight into how he imagined his own relationship to them.

Skelton’s poetic courts

Skelton’s first extended poetic exploration of life at court came in The Bowge of Courte, where finding a place in the service of the sovereign is figured as the securing of a berth aboard ship; an opportunity for wealth and fame to be seized quickly before the vessel weighs anchor and is gone. Significantly, perhaps, it is ‘marchauntes’ who board the ship first (line 40), a reminder that the court is indeed a complex institution, a source of trade, employment and industry as well as of political action, social dalliance and conspicuous consumption. The narrator, a writer seeking advancement, merely follows the tradesmen into the press of suitors. Once aboard, however, the merchants are forgotten and it is the seven vices, redolent of the Deadly Sins, but recast in a courtly mould as Favell, Suspecte, Harvey Hafter, Dysdayne, Ryotte, Dyssymuler, and Subtylte, who occupy the narrator’s mind. Each offers him their friendship, but only in order to thwart his advancement and improve their own lot, leaving him to reflect ruefully that the glittering surface of the court conceals a corrupt interior, and ‘under hony ofte tyme lyeth bytter gall’ (line 131). Logic and reason have no place in this environment. As Desire candidly confesses, it is Fortune rather than merit that determines the courtier’s fate – ‘how ever blowe the wynde, / Fortune gydeth and ruleth all our shyppe’ (lines 110–11) – and Fortune is a capricious and fatal mistress: ‘Whome she hateth shall over the see-boorde skyp’ (line 112).

The idea of the court as the precarious ‘slipper top’ of the social and political mountain, where success is always perilous and every aspirant courtier is surrounded by rivals and enemies (whether actively malicious or merely envious of others’ success), was a commonplace of moral and satirical literature from John of Salisbury and Walter Map onwards.⁷ But it gained a powerful additional resonance in the later fifteenth century as great nobles – and even monarchs themselves – were both made and broken on the anvil of civil war, and fatal reversals of fortune were part of the direct experience of every politically active individual. Skelton first came to court, then, at a time when a career in royal service, and the whole notion of courtliness associated with it, showed an even more than usually fraught aspect.

The fledgling Tudor dy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Abbreviations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1 John Skelton and the royal court
• 2 Patterns of protest and impersonation in the works of Pierre Gringore
• 3 Antipapal writing in the reign of Louis XII: propaganda and self-promotion
• 4 A defining moment: the battle of Flodden and English poetry
• 5 Dead man walking: remaniements and recontextualizations of Jean Molinet’s occasional writing
• 6 Representing the chose publicque: royal propaganda in early sixteenth-century France
• 7 Dunbar, Skelton and the nature of court culture in the early sixteenth century
• 8 David Lindsay and James V: court literature as current event
• 9 Funereal poetry in France: from Octovien de Saint-Gelais to Clément Marot
• 10 Wynkyn de Worde, Richard Pynson, and the English printing of texts translated from French
• Bibliography of works cited
• Index