Though the status of John Gower as a squire of Kent is acknowledged, it has been generally assumed that the poet sold the manor of Aldington by Thurnham, his chief holding in Kent, in 1373, moving to ...Southwark shortly afterwards. This grant, however, was not a sale, but an enfeoffment to uses, through which Gower retained a beneficial interest. Gower's occupation of the property in 1381 is attested by his action to enforce a contract for the rebuilding of his house there. The evidence that he was living at Aldington, close to Maidstone, an epicenter of the Peasants' Revolt, provides a new perspective on his representation of the rising in Vox Clamantis, Book 1 (Visio Anglie). A recognition that the grantees in 1373, including Lord Cobham, were Gower's trusted friends provides a clearer view of his social circle and helps to explain his views of Richard II.
The essay traces the subtle political theology of anger interspersed throughout William Langland's Piers Plowman. Piers Plowman portrays anger as morally ambiguous: although its narrator paints an ...unflattering portrait of Wrath in the "Confession of the Seven Deadly Sins," elsewhere he repeatedly attributes anger to obviously righteous characters, including St Truth, Christ, and Piers Plowman himself. Curiously, an early version of the poem, the A-text, elides Wrath's confession entirely. The essay contends first that Langland's omission of Wrath's confession in the A-text constitutes a rhetorical attempt to elicit righteous sentiment from his audience; and, secondly, that it was taken as such by the insurgents responsible for the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, particularly John Ball, who also conspicuously elides wrath in a conspiratorial "letter" to his cabal; and, finally, that Langland responded to Ball's catastrophic appropriation by excising the eponymous Plowman's famously vexed act of tearing St Truth's pardon from the C-text, thereby monumentalizing the tragic manner in which his radical discourse ultimately produced its own reactionary censor.
In this compelling account of the "peasants' revolt" of 1381, in which rebels burned hundreds of official archives and attacked other symbols of authority, Steven Justice demonstrates that the ...rebellion was not an uncontrolled, inarticulate explosion of peasant resentment but an informed and tactical claim to literacy and rule. Focusing on six brief, enigmatic texts written by the rebels themselves, Justice places the English peasantry within a public discourse from which historians, both medieval and modern, have thus far excluded them. He recreates the imaginative world of medieval villagers--how they worked and governed themselves, how they used official communications in unofficial ways, and how they produced a disciplined insurgent ideology. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996. In this compelling account of the "peasants' revolt" of 1381, in which rebels burned hundreds of official archives and attacked other symbols of authority, Steven Justice demonstrates that the rebellion was not an uncontrolled, inarticulate explosion of p.
This article focuses on the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 as a means of examining some of the late medieval assumptions about the nature of royal mercy. Rather than adding to the weight of scholarship on ...the causes and characteristics of the Revolt, this article discusses the views on mercy (‘grace for the rebels’)
1
The parliament rolls of medieval England hereafter
PROME, ed. C. Given-Wilson et al. (CD-ROM. Scholarly Digital Editions, Leicester, 2005), ‘Richard II: parliament of 1381, text and translation’, item 30. I would like to thank the audience of the Oxford Medieval History Seminar for their advice on an early version of this paper, and Mark Ormrod for his helpful comments on this essay in draft form.
1
that were reportedly expressed by all parties during the course of the rebellion. The first section analyses the chronicles and their references to discussion of pardon and mercy during the revolt itself. The second section examines the role of the royal pardon in the subsequent judicial proceedings in the Home Counties — who were the first recipients of pardon, and how were they able to secure royal grace? The final section then discusses the formulation of the pardon in the autumn parliament, and the debate surrounding the course of government policy in the wake of revolt on an unprecedented scale. This article seeks to demonstrate that the Crown and commons shared a common language of pardon, and understood that by framing their discussion in terms of royal grace, they were alluding to a particular kind of idealised relationship between the king and his subjects.
PDF