1. The Metropolitan Crisis of 1392

The London troubles of 1392 were not as spectacular as the armed clashes between England's king and magnates of adjacent years. In those, people died: in the Battle of Radcot Bridge during the Appellants' coup in December, 1387; in King Richard's bloody reprisals of 1397; or, ultimately, in Henry of Lancaster's armed invasion of 1399 that culminated in Richard's deposition and murder. About the magnate opposition to Richard II, there was much nostalgia, as if the fundamental issues of disposable power in the kingdom might be resolved by applications of noble muscularity, through exercise of the heroism of a chivalric or epic golden age. ¹ The conflict between the city of London - more specifically, the merchant-oligarchs there commanding a particular kind of fiscal power deriving from their city-based activities - and King Richard II that came to a crisis point in 1392 was quieter, inasmuch as the kind of power at issue was more abstract, more modern, so to speak. The conflict was financial. King Richard needed money. The corporation of the city of London and various eminent citizens were believed to have it. When, for a variety of reasons, the civic merchants hesitated to avail, the king made them give. By a series of extraordinary measures, the city was forced to submit, paying the king off lavishly and acknowledging its submission by public ceremonial on 21-22 August 1392. It was in response to these events that Richard Maidstone wrote the Latin poem, Concordia facta inter regem et cives Londonie.²

The city had been manifestly troubled throughout the reign of Richard II. On the one hand, conflicts between class factions within the city - above all between the merchant capitalists, concentrated amongst the vintners, fishmongers, grocers, mercers, and goldsmiths, whose wealth derived from distribution and exchange, and the artisans and small masters of the city, whose wealth was based on production and consumption - became acute during this period, by consequence of the growth of trade-based wealth and finance in the city, at the expense of production.³ An effort at city-constitutional reform, codified by the "Good Parliament" of 1376, to redress the balance of power in favor of the more productive but less concentratedly wealthy elements in the city - including even an experiment akin to soviet-style election of city officials by guild membership in place of ward residence - led eventually to street fighting and armed insurrection when the militant populist leader of the reformers amongst the smaller productive elements, John Northampton, failed to win reelection to a third term as mayor in October, 1383. Northampton was condemned and temporarily banished from the city, and he never after had a part in city affairs; the crisis brought by the constitutional reform movement strengthened the oligarchy's hold on power in the city to such a degree that, even after Northampton's antagonist Nicholas Brembre - the wealthiest of the merchant oligarchs by a considerable margin - was executed in 1388 for his adherence to Richard II, the oligarchic faction was still not dislodged from internal city politics. To the contrary, "Brembre's ruin was personal: the power of the capitalist party in London remained unshaken," as Ruth Bird has said; the reform effort and its sequels in the end yielded a strengthened oligarchy:

The constitutional history of the City of London during the twenty years 1376-97 is the history of an attempt so to change the forms of the constitution that the monopoly of political power held by a small number of wealthy men might be broken. These changes in form, though successfully carried out, failed to effect the desired result; but they had given rise to such opportunities of friction and violence, between classes and between misteries, that the victorious capitalist party reversed them - actuated probably also by the fear that they might be of effective use in the future - and substituted a system in some ways even more favourable to an oligarchy than that which had existed before the conflict began.⁴

On the other hand, there were in the same period conflicts between the corporate body of the city of London and the English landed aristocracy, the monarch in particular. In pursuit of various objectives in areas ranging from temporary personal advantage to international diplomacy, various aristocrats, the king leading, were inclined to interfere in city politics. The mayor Brembre's eventually fatal adherence to the king, like the transient support that Northampton enjoyed from John of Gaunt, suggests already that city-internal matters might become implicated in national and international affairs. "The really disruptive force in the community of London," Pamela Nightingale has said, "was the crown."⁵ Its disruptions were concentrated chiefly in two areas: the franchise of the city, by which participation in retail redistribution of goods was restricted to freemen of the city, thereby excluding not only foreign merchants, but also provincial immigrants and the unenfranchised (i.e., about two-thirds of the population of the city); and the staple system, by which the export of English goods, chiefly wool, was regulated, with consequences also for imports and their distribution, to the benefit or injury of the London merchant-capitalists.⁶ In the long term, maintenance of the staple system was in the interest of the monarchy too, inasmuch as the taxes it might impose on the trade passing through the port of London and the overseas staples could provide the crown with reliable income; its regular taxation of imports and exports also provided the crown with security for loans it might require, which it could and generally did repay by farming out collection of some portion of a tax to its creditors.⁷ But in response to various short-term exigencies - most often a need to raise money immediately, though also in reaction to continental affairs and diplomatic objectives - the crown chose from time to time to abrogate or to alter the staple system, or to manipulate the franchise. For example, in 1378 the crown decided to raise money for itself by selling Genoese merchants licenses to import and export goods through the port of Southampton rather than London, thereby bypassing the staples. The ramifications of this decision have recently been explored by Paul Strohm.⁸ The situation was additionally complicated by the participation of non-civic landed interests in financial affairs too, extending or withholding loans to the crown, for example, as well as in trade (the wool trade especially), sometimes in competition with the more extensively capitalized London merchant-oligarchs.⁹

In 1391, as on various earlier occasions, the crown banned denizen wool exports and suspended the foreign staples, removing such trade from the control of the London merchant-oligarchs, encouraging foreign merchants, and also giving incentive for use of other English ports, like Southampton or Hull, in place of London.¹⁰ Loans from city merchants to the crown had already dried up by this point in any event: the last corporate loan from the city to the crown had come in 1388, and loans from individual franchise-holders of the city also came to a stop, falling from over £1,500 in 1388, to about £500 in 1389, to just more than £200 in 1390, and then to none at all in 1391.¹¹ The immediate occasion for letting slip the royal wrath (according to some of the contemporary chronicle accounts) may have been provided by an armed city mob attacking the London palace of the caesarean bishop of Salisbury John Waltham, also royal treasurer and lord keeper of the privy seal, the culmination of what might otherwise have been a minor dispute over non-payment of a retail trade-bill. With the support of the archbishop of York Thomas Arundel, also lord chancellor, Waltham petitioned the king for redress of the Londoners' commercial extortions. There was also complaint of the Londoners' propensity for harboring heretical religions.¹²

In May 1392, King Richard informed the city of his intention to remove the court of common pleas to York on account of the truculence of London, and a general administrative removal took place. For the duration of 1392, in addition to the common bench, the rolls of the king's bench, the Fleet prison, the exchequers of accounts, of pleas, and of receipt, and the chancery were removed from the metropolis.¹³ At the end of the same May, Richard summoned the elected mayor, sheriffs, and aldermen of the city to appear before king and royal council at Nottingham. At the Nottingham session, 25 June, king and council deposed the elected mayor and the sheriffs and imprisoned them, replacing them with a royally chosen warden of the city and royally chosen sheriffs, who were installed in London by 29 June. On 27 June, the king empowered a royal commission "to enquire into the notorious defaults in the government of the city of London."¹⁴ About fifty of the civic governors of the city - present and past mayors, sheriffs, and aldermen - were summoned to appear before the commission. On 22 July, at Eton, the commission convicted them "by their own acknowledgment," fined them 3,000 marks, and pronounced the liberties of the city forfeited to the king.¹⁵ Additionally, the king laid a corporate fine of £100,000 on the city and took steps to bring immediately into his disposal the city's entire income, "mortgaged to pay this enormous sum."¹⁶

Caroline Barron has described these royal actions as considerate extortion, "devised over a period of months, if not years," and sprung on the city "by surprise attack."¹⁷ The city could only capitulate. The negotiations of the terms of the capitulation, by which the king was eventually reconciled to the city, are not on record, but that a reconciliation had been effected was made public by the king's pageantic reentry into the city, 21 August 1392. A series of subsequent royal acts gave substance to the reconciliation: on 17 September, the city was enjoined to elect its own sheriffs; on 19 September, by a series of royal pardons issued from Woodstock, the fines and terms of imprisonment imposed on the deposed and former mayors, sheriffs, and aldermen were pardoned, the corporate fine of £100,000 was forgiven, and the liberties of the city were restored, albeit only "until the king shall otherwise ordain."¹⁸ In October, the city elected its own mayor to replace the still serving royal warden, and the common bench and other administrative offices of state were bidden to return from the north.

This settlement's cost to the city is put in the chronicles at £20,000 to £40,000 cash paid to the king, though the royal receipt of 28 February 1393 was for only £10,000. The cash was raised within the city from various sources and by various means, evidently on a broad basis: "there was a civic tax collected in the wards assessed on lands and rents," for example; the widows and clergy of London complained to parliament of the imposition, and, according to one chronicler, numerous citizens fled the city in order to avoid compulsory contribution.¹⁹ In addition to financing the pageant entry of August, the city also paid some of the costs of the king's Christmas-time entertainment at Eltham for 1392-93 and sent lavish gifts; "in the following summer of 1393, at Richard's express command, the wardens of London Bridge paid Thomas Wreuk, a mason, to carve two stone statues of the king and queen to be placed above the stone gate on the bridge"; and in December 1394 the city loaned Richard a further 10,000 marks, which the king did eventually repay.²⁰ Still, the city's liberties were not properly restored as a matter of right rather than royal pleasure until 1397, evidently at the cost of a "loan" of another 10,000 marks, which was not repaid.²¹

Not to mention the incalculable costs of lost and irreplaceable custom, in Barron's concluding estimate, "the citizens' aloof refusals in the years 1388-92, cost them in the succeeding five years £16,666 13s 4d in straight exactions, £10,000 or so in jewels and gifts, the costs of a magnificent reception and Christmas entertainment, and the new statuary on London Bridge; in all, perhaps, a total of £30,000. Clearly the poorer citizens, such as the widows and clergy who petitioned parliament in 1394, found these exactions hard to pay."²² Other citizens would have felt differently, however, for a by-product of these royal extortions, even in the short term, was a redistribution of wealth within the city, incidental though not inconsiderable, from the poorer elements to the merchant-oligarchic few who enjoyed royal favor. Richard used the money he had extorted for a spending spree in the city:

The wardrobe account for the years 1392-4 reveals that the king purchased over £13,000-worth of saddlery, mercery, skins and drapery in these two years. Only when the wardrobe was equipping Richard's two expeditions to Ireland did its expenditure exceed this amount. Of this £13,000 about 90 per cent went into the pockets of London merchant suppliers of whom the two most prominent were the draper, John Hende, the imprisoned mayor of 1392, and the young and rising mercer, Richard Whittington [whom Richard was to appoint mayor in extraordinary circumstances in 1397]. It may be, therefore, that much of the money which Richard extorted from the citizens found its way back into their pockets in the form of purchases for the royal wardrobe and household. Of course, far more Londoners contributed to the £10,000 fine [paid the king in early 1393] than acted as royal suppliers.²³

In such a context, it may be difficult to see the point of the lavish pageantic entry that was staged for the king. By August, it would have been clear that the money was coming to him as fast as the city could gather it, and it might have been thought sufficient had he restored civic self-governance and quietly returned his administration to London. There is no evidence that the public ceremonial was a stipulated part of the deal by which the crisis was resolved, nor that the entry was requested by the king or suggested by his party, or whether it was simply a douceur, however excessive, offered spontaneously by the city.²⁴ In any case, the king is felt to have had a fondness for this sort of thing, and the city was put to great trouble and expense about staging the entry; usually, though, with such Ricardian spectacles, something greater was in view than an infantile fascination with fripperies. For example, the point of the 1390 Smithfield tournament, which included a scripted pageantry in which Chaucer may have had a hand, was international and diplomatic. Sheila Lindenbaum has asserted that there was something financial in it for the merchantry of the city, too, in the form of monies brought into the city economy with the influx of rich visitors, the construction, the provisioning, and so forth.²⁵ But above all, Richard was keeping up with his French royal compeers. The entry into Paris of the Valois queen Isabella just months earlier was the avowed model. The tournament attracted various foreign participants, who would have returned to their homes with concrete evidence of the magnificence (and hence the disposable power) of the English monarch, however embattled he was in real albeit less public terms at the time. One of the featured foreign participants was a Count William of Ostrevant, with whom Richard needed an alliance, as Nigel Saul has pointed out, to further his anti-Valois continental agenda.²⁶ In addition to marking publicly the return of royal favor to the metropolis, the 1392 pageantry had also the larger purpose of articulating the conception of royal power animating Richard's actions at the time. Better than any other source, Maidstone's poem on the entry clarifies this larger political agenda. In a way done comparably only by such other contemporary documents as the chancellors' sermons with which the Ricardian parliaments were opened,²⁷ Maidstone's poem tells what Richard's objectives for his kingship were.


2. Richard Maidstone

The author of the poem Concordia, occasioned by this 1392 crisis, was Richard Maidstone, a Carmelite friar. A date for his birth in the 1350s, or possibly slightly earlier, may be inferred from his having entered his order by 1376 at the Aylesford Convent, Kent, the house where the order had been founded in England in 1242. There is record of Maidstone's ordination to the priesthood, by the bishop of Winchester William Wykeham, on 20 December 1376. After his death on 1 June 1396, he was buried in the cloister of the same Aylesford Convent. Meanwhile, Maidstone was licensed to preach and to hear confessions in the Rochester diocese, 24 March 1390, and, by the evidence of his own statements, he earned the B.D. and D.D. degrees at Oxford, though no records of the dates or other circumstances of the degrees' grantings have come to light.²⁸

Maidstone was evidently a confessor to John of Gaunt, the over-mighty royal uncle, who had a history of meddling in London politics.²⁹ The anti-civic part he had to play in the "Good Parliament" in 1376 (both Edward III and the Black Prince were incapable at the moment) and Gaunt's public advocacy afterwards, during 1377, of proposals to abrogate salient civic liberties (including a proposal for royal appointment of a "captain" for London, to replace the traditional annual mayoral election) left residual resentment. Gaunt's city residence, the Savoy, attracted special attention in 1381 from the revolutionaries, who razed it - the only city property treated this way - pointedly not looting it beforehand.³⁰ In the same period, Gaunt lent equivocal, then diminishing support to the militant populist political reformer and mayor, John Northampton, whom Thomas Usk the Chaucerian notoriously betrayed in 1383-84, after Northampton's defeat in the violently contested mayoral election of October, 1383.³¹

Gaunt is known to have favored the English Carmelites, and, by special papal dispensation, he did employ a series of distinguished Carmelites as personal confessors, including William Badby, Walter Diss, and John Kynyngham.³² Gaunt is also known to have patronized writers, though the extent of his patronage and the policy or policies that might have animated it remain to be clarified by systematic study. Speght's 1602 assertion that Chaucer's "An ABC" was written at the request of Blanche, Gaunt's duchess, a similar though earlier assertion that the Complaint of Mars was written for Gaunt himself, the Book of the Duchess and the annuity Gaunt paid Chaucer from 1374 have suggested patronal favor for Chaucer as a writer, though the evidence is equivocal.³³ More certainly, Gaunt aided John Wyclif, though only early in Wyclif's controversial career, before the Blackfriars condemnation of 1382, by which point Gaunt's Carmelites had turned him against the heresiarch.³⁴ Moreover, Gaunt received the dedication of the Kalendarium of Nicholas of Lynn - another Carmelite - in 1386, having encouraged the work.³⁵ The nearest analogue possibly for Maidstone's Concordia may be the grand poem of Walter of Peterborough (who may also have been a confessor of Gaunt), written in about five hundred Latin elegiacs in celebration of the English victory at Najera in 1367. Walter praises Gaunt particularly, using the same sort of classicizing rhetoric that Maidstone was later to use in the Concordia. A verse preface surviving with one of the copies of Walter's effusion addresses the poem to Gaunt through the agency of the treasurer of Gaunt's household, John Marton; but Walter was disappointed, it seems, for the same copy also includes a verse envoy in which the poet complains that the patronal munificence he had hoped to attract had not been forthcoming.³⁶

Gaunt's personal interest in the 1392 metropolitan crisis would seem to have been limited. The monk of Westminster and Thomas Walsingham both name Gaunt among those who interceded on the city's behalf with the king, and, in October 1392, Gaunt and the other two royal uncles, Clarence and Gloucester, were given gifts of £400 and a gilt basin by a city delegation for reasons unspecified.³⁷ On the other hand, Gaunt was abroad, negotiating peace with the French, from mid-March until mid-May 1392, during a critical period, though he was present at various royal councils both before and afterwards. Most significantly, Gaunt was not appointed to the royal commission of inquiry - the one that summoned the Londoners to Eton, deposed the city government, and imposed the £100,000 fine, on 25-27 June 1392 - though the other royal uncles were. In mid-August, at the time of the pageantic reconciliation with the city, Gaunt was on some kind of holiday, hunting in the north of England.

Be this various evidence as it may, the fact remains that Maidstone does not mention Gaunt in the Concordia (nor in any of the other writings of his that have been published). The evidence that Maidstone was a confessor of Gaunt's seems reliable enough. Nevertheless, tantalizing as the inference may be, it cannot be corroborated that, in 1392 or on some other occasion, Maidstone may also have been in Gaunt's employ as a poet or may have enjoyed Gaunt's patronage for his literary efforts.

Even the most literary of Maidstone's surviving writings, an English paraphrase of the seven penitential psalms in some eight hundred lines of rhyming stanzaic verse,³⁸ suggests that he was an ideologue. "Avowedly orthodox, pro-ecclesiastical, pro-sacerdotal," the paraphrase is above all a stimulus penitentiae (the recurrent, quasi-refrain-like phrase it uses is a reminder that Christ "dere us bougte"), by which the reader is prepared to enter the more thoroughly into the sacrament of penance, confession particularly, requiring of course the church's mediation and the ministrations of a priest-confessor.³⁹ The Fourth Lateran Council's imposition of universally obligatory annual confession in 1215 had made this sacrament the central churchly intervention in the lives of lay persons, second only to the sacrament of the Eucharist; moreover, by contrast with the Mass, to the degree that confession was personal and involved more active lay participation, it was the more effective institutional tool for indoctrination, akin to preaching in this respect, only more coercive inasmuch as the priest-confessor was endowed with effective power to withhold absolution. As Eamon Duffy delicately asserts, "in principle, this ruling [of the Fourth Lateran] put into the hands of the parish clergy an immensely valuable pastoral and educational tool, for the priest in confession could explore not only the moral condition of his parishioners, but also their knowledge of Catholic faith and practice. . . . Confessional practice and the catechetical and preaching programme of the English Church in the fifteenth century were closely linked."⁴⁰

By means of a series of local ecclesiastical constitutions - most influentially perhaps the Lambeth Constitutions of Pecham, archbishop of Canterbury, in 1281 and the Constitutions of Thoresby, archbishop of York, in 1357 - an official program of lay indoctrination was put in motion, entailing the creation of an extensive literature, in Latin and in England's vernaculars, for propagating basic knowledge of the faith.⁴¹ John Thompson has suggested that Maidstone's psalms, like the later 1414 paraphrase of the same psalms by Thomas Brampton, may have been conceived and written precisely for the kind of bundled circulation with other brief vernacular items on doctrinal basics in which it does occur.⁴² Twenty-seven copies of various redactions of Maidstone's penitential psalms survive, all of them in manuscripts comprising collections of cognate doctrinal and devotional vernacular writings, the commonest in circulation with Maidstone's work being The Prick of Conscience.⁴³

"Popular piety seems here to have absorbed and interiorized clerical objectives without any sense of incongruity," concludes Duffy.⁴⁴ In fact, the contemporary "sense of incongruity" seems to have been acute in this area; there was considerable popular objection to the impositions of confession and the aggrandizement of priestly power that came with it, as propagated by such writings as Maidstone's psalms. The Lollard agitation against problems associated with this sacrament was extensive; for example, one of the Lollard "Twelve Conclusions" of c. 1395 made just this point:

the articlis of confession that is sayd necessari to salvaciun of man, with a feynid power of absoliciun enhaunsith prestis pride and yevith hem opertunite of privi calling . . . . Thei seyn that thei ben commissariis of God to deme of every synne, to foulin and to clensin qwom so thei lyke. Thei seyn that thei han the keys of hevene and of helle; thei mown cursyn and blissin, byndin and unbyndin at here owne wil, in so miche that for a busschel of qwete or xii.d be yere thei welen selle the blisse of hevene.⁴⁵

Maidstone was active not only in promoting sacramental orthodoxy, but also in direct anti-Lollard activities. Among the works imputed to him by Bale is a tract Contra Wiclevistas, though it is not known to survive.⁴⁶ Maidstone, however, also involved himself in anti-Lollard agitation at Oxford, specifically in public controversy with John Ashwardby, vicar of St. Mary the Virgin (the university church of Oxford), over a period of some months at some indeter-minate point between 1384 and 1395, possibly c. 1392.⁴⁷ Tellingly, and as is characteristic of such cases, Ashwardby's contributions do not survive; his provocations are known only through the reports of them in Maidstone's hostile reactions: a longer, earlier tract, Protectorium pauperum, eventually copied into the Fasciculi Zizaniorum, the Carmelite dossier of anti-Lollard documentary tools;⁴⁸ and a briefer, more focusedly acerb polemic, Determinacio contra Magistrum Johannem vicarium ecclesie Sancte Marie Oxoniensis, in which reference is made to the Protectorium.⁴⁹

Evidently, Ashwardby, a secular, had formed doubts about the sort of mendicancy espoused by Maidstone and others similarly placed. Trouble came when Ashwardby voiced such doubts in his public preaching. Moreover, he took to preaching on the dubieties of mendicancy "in Anglicis [sc. verbis]" ["in English"], not "in scolis et coram clericis in lingua latina" ["in the schools for a clerical audience in Latin"], but "coram laicis in lingua materna" ["for a lay audience, in the mother-tongue"]. Ashwardby went so far as to advocate the position that it was wrong, even sinful, to give alms to mendicants, and argued furthermore that his auditors were bound to stop doing so. To the mendicant friar "est tribuendum, set quid?" ["giving is appropriate, but giving what?"]. Maidstone represents Ashwardby's position as "non elemosina corporalis, non cibum, non potus, non hospicium, set aspera increpacio et acuta correpcio, ut per hoc discat stultitiam suam, qui se obligavit ad huiusmodi mendicitatem" ["not bodily sustenance, nor food, nor drink, nor shelter, but sharp rebuke and strict correction, that the mendicant might come thereby to know his own stupidity, the stupidity that binds him to this sort of mendacity"].⁵⁰ In giving voice to such a position, Ashwardby aligned himself, provocatively in Maidstone's view, with those who "his diebus quidam evangelicae paupertatis et aemuli Christi pauperes voluntarios eleemosynis fidelium non debere sustentari docent et praedicant . . . multaque contra sanctos Christi ore blasphemo perstrepere non formidant" ["go about these days to teach and to preach that those who elect to be poor, in emulation of Christ and the evangelical poverty, ought not to be given sustenance . . . and they have no shame to croak out a good deal more besides, set against Christ's saints, with the voice of blasphemy"].⁵¹

Ashwardby used the argument that mendicancy was a variety of theft, Robin Hood in reverse, by which false mendicants "pauperes Christi suo vectu expoliant et defraudent" ["despoil and defraud Christ's own poor of their due"].⁵² Alms-giving to representatives of such already wealthy ecclesiastical establishments as the fraternal orders effectively took charitable sustenance away from the truly needy, who suffered by consequence. Maidstone understood where such arguments might lead: to the undoing of pilgrimage and other forms of veneration of the saints, and to a wholesale despoiling of the church and even derogation of the donation of Constantine. From such views it followed

quod praedia et possessiones datae collegiis et monasteriis possessionatis, archiepiscopis et episcopis etiam ad sustentationem clericorum et monachorum Deo servientium, essent malae collatae; oblationes etiam eleemosynae quae conferuntur a fidelibus et peregrinis ad aedificia basilicarum, et ad alios pios usus, ubi Domino servitur vel ubi imagines et corpora sanctorum martyrum venerantur, essent penitus inutiles et infructuosae. . . . et tandem concedet quod non est eleemosyna vel opus meritorium parochiano aliquid conferre suo rectori vel vicario corpore valido, ultra oblationes de consuetudine debitas et decimas iure taxatas; et finaliter quod eleemosyna quam contulit Constantinus Silvestro, quando dotavit ecclesiam, fuit potius demeritoria quam meritoria.

[that bequests and belongings given colleges and possessionary monasteries, archbishops and bishops, even for the sustenance of clerks and monks serving God, are wrongfully given; that offeratory alms, given by church-goers and pilgrims - where the divine service is done, or the images and relics of the sainted martyrs are venerated - for construction work in churches and the like pious projects, are altogether useless and pointless; . . . in the end, he reveals that it is not alms-giving, nor any meritorious deed, to give anything at all to one's vicar or rector - be he of sound body - except the customarily obligatory offerings and such tithings as are justly levied; and finally that the alms-deed that Constantine made Sylvester, when he endowed the church, was rather derogatory than a credit to him.]⁵³

Maidstone's narrower, immediate response was to accuse Ashwardby and others of his views of theft in their turn. Their strictures were only invidious: "Ex his omnibus, ut mihi videtur, sufficienter declaratum est ad quantum errorem processit malitia quorundam modernorum docentium publice et praedicando sic: nulli des pecuniam vel denarium qui plures habet quam tu, nulli des cibum aut potum qui melius solet pasci quam tu, et sic de aliis" ["From all the evidence, it seems to me adequately clear how deeply into error will extend the malice of those of the moderns who are willing to teach publicly and to preach in such terms: 'Give cash or funding to no one who has more than you; give food and drink to no one who seems better fed than you'; and so forth"].⁵⁴ Maidstone represents the doubter as if saying to himself, "Video quod isti fratres habent meliores domus quam ego, meliora indumenta quam ego, meliores libros, et huiusmodi; video bene habundanciam eorum, set non video indigenciam, et quia videtur michi quod mendicant vbi non indigent, ideo corripio illos et increpo nec aliquid aliud dabo illis" ["'I see those friars living in better homes than I have, wearing better clothes than I do, having better books,' and so forth; 'clearly indeed do I see their wealth, but I see no indigence; wherefore I attack them and complain, nor will I ever give them anything more'"].⁵⁵ In dissuading pious laypersons from giving charity to friars ("immo hoc omnino in sermonibus suis et actibus conantur efficere ut seculares devoti, qui servis Dei ministrant necessaria vite, a sua devocione cessent et desinant" ["indeed, and this whole-heartedly, by their preachments and their practice, they try to see to it that such pious laypersons as look after the vital needs of God's servants leave off their devotion and desist"]), Ashwardby and his like were doing real harm:

Et propterea predicant v[i]ctum non debere dari, quia melius solet pasci quam tu, non vestitum, quia melius induitur quam tu, non hospicium quia meliorem habet domum quam tu, et sic de aliis, ut per subtraccionem elemosinarum non solum divites meritum perdant, set et Christi pauperes priventur vite necessariis, et sic miserabilius pereant quam pecora vel iumenta.

[Moreover, they preach that food ought not be given since he (i.e., the friar) seems better fed than you, nor clothing, since he is better dressed than you, nor shelter, since he has a better home than you, and so on and so forth, in order not only that the well-to-do might lose merit, but also that Christ's own poor should be deprived of the necessities of life and thereby die more wretched deaths than swine or cattle - all for the elimination of alms-giving.]⁵⁶

In addition to murdering friars all but directly, as Maidstone implies, Ashwardby had also to be held responsible for his intention to turn others likewise into "latrones et homicides et expoliatores ecclesiarum" ["thieves and killers and church-pillagers"], no different from Lollards:

Et ideo videtur michi, sicut et merito videri debet cuilibet advertenti, quod intencio doctoris mei [i.e., Ashwardby] et omnium sibi simil[i]um non est alia nisi ut persuasiones et predicaciones su[e] possint avertere animos fidelium, ita ut amplius non conferant fratribus elemosinas suas et sic per inediam et angustiam compellat eos ad apostasiam, sintque latrones et homicides et expoliatores ecclesiarum, sicut maior pars est hiis diebus omnium qui sunt de secta lollardorum.

[And so it seems to me - as it ought to anyone else who cares to consider the matter aright - that the purpose of this good doctor (i.e., Ashwardby) and all of the same ilk, is none other than that their arguments and exhortations should so pervert the hearts and minds of the faithful that they would give alms to friars no more, in order that, through starvation and straightened circumstance, he might drive friars into apostasy, making them killers and thieves and church-pillagers, as are already, even now, the most part of all adherents of Lollardy.]⁵⁷

Maidstone does not directly call Ashwardby a Lollard. He accuses him of promoting views and courses of action espoused by Lollards and of using the sort of verbal equivocation resorted to by persons anticipating charges of heresy (whereby, "forte si coram inquisitore heretice pravitatis essent de tanto errore culpati, possent se excusare" ["if, perchance, they were to stand before an inquiry into heretical depravity, accused of such error, they find means for exculpating themselves"]).⁵⁸ Maidstone names Ashwardby's views errores repeatedly, a charged term with particular legal weight in the context: some of the views of Ashwardby singled out for refutation by Maidstone were officially condemned as errores by the 1382 Blackfriars Council.⁵⁹ For Maidstone, Ashwardby was unequivocally a subversor fidei ("Quis predicat ista, nisi subversor fidei?" ["who would preach such things except a subverter of the faith?"]):⁶⁰ Ashwardby's interventions were Lollard-like, both in his resorting to English for conducting his public doctrinal discussion and in the substance of what he had to say. Attacks on concentrations of temporal wealth in the established church's control were a fundamental aspect of the Lollard program, as was the related, broad-fronted assault on private religions as ultimately anti-social and exploitive.⁶¹ The specific conjunction at which Ashwardby seems to have been aiming - by his critique of a specific form of private religion because it was a specific form of official churchly theft - was a weak link vulnerable to attack on several grounds.

Maidstone teases out these scarifying propensities of Ashwardby's positions, raising the specter of the Lollard menace the better to exorcise it. Also, he puts some effort into arguing scripture with Ashwardby, showing that, by light of authoritative canons of Biblical interpretation, Ashwardby's exegeses were wrong. As in his Biblical explications, so too in his refutation of Ashwardby generally: for Maidstone, as Valerie Edden has said, what mattered was authority.⁶² The mendicancy that Maidstone defended was right because authority - popes and lesser officers of the hierarchy, fathers of the church and other saints, and the established tradition of church practice - said it was right: "quod non solum quattuor ordines mendicancium sunt approbati in iure communi et ab ecclesia in quantum sunt ordines, set in quantum sunt mendicantes; ita quod mendicitas eorum non solum est permissa ab ecclesia set eciam approbata, cuius oppositum in vulgari predicavit ad populum . . . doctor meus reverendus (i.e., Ashwardby)" ["that the four mendicant orders enjoy the approbation of common law and the church, not only inasmuch as they are orders, but also inasmuch as they are mendicant, so that their mendicancy is not just suffered by the church, but is indeed promoted - the very opposite of what is being preached, in English, to the folk, by the reverend good doctor (i.e., Ashwardby)"].⁶³ Those who would dissent from this view were criminals, subject to official anathema and the wrath of God and the saints:

Preterea, inpedire mendicitatem fratrum prohibetur a sede apostolica sub optentu illius indulgencie que continetur in omni bulla sub clausula "Nulli igitur." Que quidem indulgencia non est aliud quam indignacio Dei omnipotentis et beatorum apostoli Petri et Pauli. Set omne tale est approbatum a sede apostolica, cuius impedimentum est prohibitum ab eadem. . . . Quicunque fratribus ipsis in predicacionibus, confessionibus, sepulturis et elemosinis mediate vel inmediate inpedimentum prestant sub anathematis vinculo innodati sunt.

[Moreover, to hinder the mendicancy of friars is forbidden by the apostolic see, by provision of the indulgence specified for the papal bull as a whole under the clause "To none therefore." The indulgence is none other than the very wrath of omnipotent God above and the sainted apostles Peter and Paul. Indeed, all such enjoy the approbation of the Holy See, and any hinderance of the same is strictly forbidden. . . . Anyone who puts lets, direct or indirect, in the friars' way, in respect of their preaching, confessing, burying, or alms-taking activities, is bound by the strictest bonds of anathema.]⁶⁴
 

3. The Concordia

The poem that Richard Maidstone wrote on the metropolitan crisis of 1392 reports information about the royal entry that concluded it in greater detail than any other source. The poem is not primarily a report, however; like Maidstone's other writings, the poem is above all an ideologically driven literary intervention, produced at a particular moment, addressing a particular political circumstance. The nature of the audience it aims at is difficult to divine - certainly clerical, certainly secular or secularizing, possibly even narrowly courtly or courtly-clerical, certainly not popular, though not exactingly learned either - but, be that as it may, the poem is propaganda. In certain respects (e.g., the anti-Lollard remarks put into King Richard's mouth), the agenda may be Carmelite or idiosyncratically Maidstonian; chiefly, though, its agenda is royalist. The poem engrosses royal power, apologizing for and promoting a peculiarly Ricardian notion of "peace," in the form of submission to royal authority, however willful or arbitrary it might show itself to be. This is the sense made by the poem of the key term in its title, concordia: blank authoritarianism.

3.1. The Pageantry

There are five additional witnesses - contemporary and credibly independent of one another - to the events in London of 21-22 August 1392. In order of circumstantiality of detail and evident nearness to the events, these are: (1) an epistolary report from an unnamed writer to an unspecified addressee in French prose, a copy of which was kept in the episcopal register of Durham; (2) a Latin prose account by the so-called Monk of Westminster in a passage of the so-called Westminster Chronicle's continuous narration of events of the period 1381-94; (3) the Latin prose account in the Chronicon of Henry Knighton (d. 1396), again within a continuous narration; (4) the English prose account in the "Common Version" of the continuation of the Brut for the period 1377-1419; and (5) a less circumstantial, more dis-tanced summary remark on events in Thomas Walsingham's Historia anglicana (albeit that, for explaining the background of the crisis, Walsingham is distinctly better informed).⁶⁵

Helen Suggett suggested that the surviving French letter might reflect - or indeed might be - an official account of the London event, written and circulated with royal or governmental sponsorship, to propagate news of the city's submission.⁶⁶ The letter's anonymous preservation, without named addressor or addressee, in the Durham episcopal register, as if an official document, lends weight to the suggestion, as might also the evidence for propagation of official accounts of other near contemporary news of state. The circulation of such reports of the "Good Parliament" of 1376, for example, and of the process of the "Merciless Parliament" of 1388 has been inferred from surviving chronicle accounts, though the most thoroughly studied cases date from the later period, 1397-99, of Richard II's tyranny and deposition.⁶⁷ Publicizing the king's victory of 1392 would have served a clear interest, and there may well have been an official effort to do so, possibly attested by the surviving letter. On the other hand, the pageantic entry itself already advertised the royal triumph publicly enough, and such agreements as there are among the surviving accounts may reflect direct witness to the civic events themselves, rather than the mediation of some shared documentary source. None would appear to have had access to private or restricted information.

Maidstone's poem and the other witnesses agree about the day's events, albeit there are intermittent omissions on the part of one or another of the sources. The returning monarch, with his queen, was first greeted near Wandsworth, by an extensive civic delegation: numerous representatives of the various city guilds, all distinctively liveried and posed together by guild, the twenty-four aldermen of the city, and the (royally appointed) warden, or custos. On their knees, the aldermen and custos here made presentation to the king of the sword of the city and its keys - with the warden addressing the king, and handling and handing over the symbolic tokens.

Somewhat nearer the city, the king was likewise greeted by an extensive delegation of the religious of the city - friars, monks, secular priests and clerks, boys, and even the bishop of London - singing the Te Deum and the Summe Trinitati.

At Bridgegate, following speeches of welcome on behalf of the aldermen and the whole corporation, the warden made presentation to the king of two great horses, trapped with cloth of gold and parti-colored red and white fabric, with saddles of silver, and to the queen of a great palfrey, similarly trapped, with a saddle of gold.

At the entry into Fish Street, two handsome young men with gold thuribles honored the king by censing him.

At the Great Conduit in Cheapside, running with red wine for the occasion, king and queen were greeted by a choir posed atop the conduit structure, whence also maidens scattered gold coins; and a boy, costumed as an angel in white, offered them a drink from a gold cup.

Then beyond the Great Conduit, still in Cheap, had been erected - over the street, apparently, suspended by ropes - a great tower, from which descended, as if borne on clouds ("hors d'une nuwe" - Appendix 1, p. 91), two caroling angels, a boy and a girl, bringing gilt crowns of great cost, one for the king and one for the queen; with appropriate speeches, the custos crowned king and queen with the angels' gifts.

The procession continued along Cheap to the Little Conduit, where was posed a choir of caroling angels to greet the king, musicians and singers alike arranged in three ranks around an impersonation of the Trinity crowning the structure.

Then the king was met by a clerical procession issuing from St. Paul's that conducted him to the church door, where the king dismounted; there he entered and made offering at the tomb of the fabled bishop of London, St. Erkenwald.

At Ludgate, going out of the city proper, atop Temple Bar, was the representation of a wilderness, with appropriate flora and impersonations of a variety of fauna as well. In this setting was a figure recognizable as John the Baptist, who called out on seeing the king, "Agnus et ecce dei" ["Look, the Lamb of God" - line 372]. An angel or angels came down from this construction, with additional gifts from the city for the king and queen; with speeches again, the city custos presented a gilt-engraved tablet of the Crucifixion to the king and, to the queen, a gilt-engraved tablet of St. Anne, to whom she was specially devoted.

Processing on towards Westminster, the king and queen passed through crowds - especially thick at the Savoy, according to one source - along a route decorated with paintings and images, as well as banners and draperies of cloth of gold, silk, and double-dyed fabrics.

From Westminster Abbey issued another clerical procession of greeting, which conducted king and queen into the abbey for an elaborate service (described in detail by the Monk of Westminster, who would have been a participant).

Then at Westminster palace, the king, who had by now been riding all day, was ceremonially redressed, "en une longe gowne" (Appendix 1, p. 91), and enthroned in sight of the attendant citizenry. His queen, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the bishop of London, on their knees, imprecated the king's mercy on behalf of the city. In response, the king's forgiveness was publicly announced, and he was thanked officially for it in a final speech by the custos.

After drinking some wine and eating some spices, by way of refection after such labors, the king went on privately to sup at Kennington, and all departed.

The following day, again in the city proper, the city custos hosted a banquet honoring the king and queen, in the course of which the king was presented with a great dining table, silver and gilt enameled, nine feet long, and costing 500 marks, according to one of the sources, and, at the same time, the queen was presented with a hanaper of beryl and a ewer of gold.


3.2. Propaganda

As Gordon Kipling has pointed out, these 1392 events had the shape of a coronation entry, as attested by a variety of roughly contemporary northern European examples, which all took their meaning, broadly, in Kipling's view at least, from the parallel scriptural model of Christ's Easter-season entry into Jerusalem.⁶⁸ Though Maidstone does relatively little with the biblical matter the events supplied him, the pageantry did unequivocally equate King Richard with Jesus Christ the savior, most egregiously in the Ludgate tableau, with its John the Baptist figure pointing to Richard, calling out "Agnus et ecce dei" ["Look, the Lamb of God" - line 372]. Richard was favored on other occasions by the same sort of equation, with Christ as savior or Christ as martyr, and always with the same unscrupulous enlistment of piety in support of worldly political causes.⁶⁹

The more immediate, specific parallel for the 1392 event, however, as Kipling also points out, was the actual coronation entry of King Richard in 1377. The 1377 entry followed the same route and employed some of the same pageants, most noteworthily perhaps at the Great Conduit, where, in 1377, on his way through the city, Richard had seen much the same business: the conduit running wine, "transfigured as the City of Heaven," where "Angels stood atop the four towers scattering gold leaves in his path and gold florins upon his person."⁷⁰ These parallels between the 1377 and 1392 entries may be regarded as reflecting a prudential economy on the part of the city. What had worked satisfactorily in 1377 could be made to serve again in 1392, without new investment; there may not have been ample time to prepare the 1392 entry, and the city did not have long or varied experience of staging such shows anyway; the exigent thing, given these circumstances, was repetition. At the same time, however, the repetition would inevitably have had specific exploitable symbolic gravities. By in effect crowning the king again in 1392, the city admitted that its antecedent reluctance to submit to the royal will was criminal, even insurrectionary. All of the city's concerns about its liberties, the franchise and the staples, royal and noble interference in civic political arrangements, and its own internal factional struggles, or aristocratic and royal extortion, were impertinent here. By its insubordination, the city had effectively dethroned its rightful king; now, properly servile, the city tried to make good its malfeasance by crowning him king again.

The medieval royal entries into London as a whole constitute speech "about power," as Lawrence M. Clopper has concluded, in which "the monarch and his court usurp the city to act out their social drama. The action is exclusionary even though it is intended through display and majesty to create a bond between the ruler and the ruled."⁷¹ Though the 1392 royal entry in particular deployed scriptural references and schemes, it was still fundamentally political, "about power," rather than spiritual or religious; and it was the political and social import of the symbolic events that Maidstone particularly developed in the poem he wrote for the occasion. As a repetition of the 1377 coronation entry, Maidstone's representation of the 1392 event had parallels also with other historical political spectacles, such as the ancient Roman triumphus or, more precisely, with the imperial adventus.⁷² Though the events themselves seem to have done little with such parallels, Maidstone amplified them. For example, he describes the mayor and aldermen as toga-wearing senators, explaining their role in civic governance in these terms: "Iure senatorio, urbs hiis regitur quasi Roma" ["Like Rome, the city's ruled by them, as senators" - line 73]; later Richard, having entered the city on horseback avowedly like a "Caesar," line 200 (compare line 431), mounts a tribunal ("nitidum scandit . . . tribunal" - line 461) to address the thronging crowds. These parallels might tend to make Richard a Marius or a Sulla or some other antique dictator or imperator returning to Rome with an army at his back and proscriptions in prospect, though Maidstone does not take things so far.

In other ways as well, Maidstone shapes the material provided him by events to engross King Richard's authority. Most important is the structure Maidstone imparted to his whole poem by the ending he put on it. All other sources of information about the 1392 entry include description of the concluding banquet, at which the king and queen were given, appropriately, an ornate dining table and elaborate vessels for serving. In the end, Richard and the city oligarchs sat together and dined. The epistolary report (nearest an official account) describes the conjoint festal celebrations as extending into the night, with the king accompanied on his way home from the city banqueting hall to his palace at Westminster by crowds of common well-wishers, who were invited into the palace to share a final goodnight drink with the king.⁷³

The symbolic valence of such banqueting - widely developed by Shakespeare, for example, in the "interrupted banquet" scene of The Tempest (3.3) - is specific. It stands for social harmony. Eating together can even have egalitarian implications, serving as a reminder that, all the evidences of inequality notwithstanding, within the human community all still share basic needs, king and commoner alike. But this was not the type of concordia that Maidstone wished to affirm. He omits the banquet. Maidstone's poem ends instead with the king's enthronement and the speech of dire warning pronounced thence. The concluding image with which Maidstone leaves his readers is not the banquet, but this impersonal tableau vivant of a hierophant enthroned on a dais, freighted with other distancing emblems of regal authority, scarcely human at all, but above all the divinized vessel ("Agnus et ecce dei" ["Look, the Lamb of God" - line 372]) of an implacable power to which mortals were bound to submit, recognizing in him the inhabitation of this extraordinary and supernatural something. Maidstone's poem provided the king "a portrait of himself as triumphant over the powers of both time and of rebellion," Lynn Staley comments, "in a way that is emphatically ceremonial, formal, hieratic, and at a far remove from the festive mode;"⁷⁴ and there is other evidence for Richard's repeated use of such hieratic self-presentations for attempting to intimidate the people around him. The Eulogium-continuator has information about his manner at crown-wearings:

Rex in diebus solennibus in quibus utebatur de more regalibus jussit sibi in camera parari thronum, in quo post prandium se ostentans sedere solebat usque ad vesperas, nulli loquens sed singulos aspiciens. Et cum aliquem respiceret, cuiuscumque gradus fuerit, oportuit ipsum genuflectere.

[On solemn occasions, on which it was his habit to put his insignia of royalty to use, the king ordered a throne to be set up for him in his rooms, on which he would then sit, from after dinner until vespers, making display of his person, speaking to none but studying them all. When his gaze attached to someone, that person was expected to kneel to the king, there and then, no matter his rank.]⁷⁵

The image from the 1392 entry with which Maidstone ends his poem is the same sort of real-life repetition of the Westminster portrait of King Richard that the Eulogium also describes, done in flesh and cloth and furniture.⁷⁶ Evidently, the king himself did not even speak on the 1392 occasion, instead holding himself beyond direct communication; his threats were delivered through the mouth of a royal officer, as if the words of the living god speaking through an empty oracular vessel.⁷⁷

The sequence of gift-givings leading up to this point, in the London pageant as in Maidstone's representation of it, prepares for the climactic image of authority's need for submission: first, the keys to the city (inevitably a reminder, post-Freud, also of a more basic kind of power over others than that coming of access to a city by its gates) and a sword, its point at the throat of the mayor ("ad instar / Tristis captivi" ["Just like a prisoner, / With woeful face" - lines 134-35]) and, by extension, at the throats of the aldermen kneeling with him and the whole city (lines 132-53);⁷⁸ then richly trapped and saddled horses (brute force, in other words) readied for submission to the king's and queen's control ("Dantur in hoc signum," as Maidstone's custos explains, "quod se reddunt modo cives: / Corpora, divicias, Pergama, queque sua" ["They're given as a sign that Londoners now yield / Their bodies, riches, Pergamum, and all that's theirs" - lines 211-12]); then the crowns that conventionally give public evidence of authority (lines 289-316); and finally, the pious images of the crucified Christ Jesus and his grandmother St. Anne enjoining mercy and in doing so implying the real possibility of its opposite (lines 379-452).

The speeches accompanying the gift-givings in Maidstone's account - certainly fabricated by Maidstone though probably also reflecting something of what was actually said⁷⁹ - make repetitions of this basic sequence of civic submission and royal acquiescence. At Wandsworth, the custos represents London's citizenry as prostrate: "En, humiles cives, vestris pedibus provoluti, / Reddunt se vobis et sua cunta simul" ["Behold: your humble citizens, beneath your feet / Surrender all they have and their own selves to you" - lines 139-40]; "Acceptamus," the king replies, "tam vos quam reddere vestrum" ["We take you in, and your surrender, willingly" - line 150]. Again at Bridgegate, having already pointed out "quod se reddunt modo cives: / Corpora, divicias, Pergama, queque sua" ["that Londoners now yield / Their bodies, riches, Pergamum, and all that's theirs" - lines 211-12], the custos adds: "In vestris manibus sit eorum vitaque morsque, / Et regat ad libitum regia virga suos" ["Their life and death is now to be within your hands, / And may your royal rod guide subjects at its will" - lines 213-14]; the king, "contentus ad hec" ["at this contented" - line 215], replies: "Concedimus pacem genti que restat in urbe" ["We grant our peace to those that live within these walls" - line 217]. In Cheapside, giving the two crowns, the custos asserts that the plebs of the city "Mittit et hinc, binas vobis referendo coronas, / Innumeras grates, si capiatis eas" ["And so they send to you, by giving these two crowns, / Their countless thanks, if you will kindly take this gift" - lines 305-06]; "Contentantur ad hec," Maidstone reports, "tam rex quam regia coniux; / Subridendo parum sumit uterque datum" ["At this the king and royal bride are well content; / And, smiling slightly, each one takes their gift in turn" - lines 309-10]. At Ludgate, the custos voices the hope that "regis et ira cadit" ["the royal wrath / Subsides" - lines 407-08] now that the king sees the city's submission in the gifts it gives, "In signum pacis quam rogat hic populus" ["To signify the peace which all your people beg" - line 420]; the king replies, "Sponte remitto mee crimina cunta plebis" ["I grant forgiveness gladly for my people's crimes" - line 426].

These repetitions culminate in the speech from the throne with which Maidstone ends his poem. On behalf of the city, the queen again offers submission and begs for mercy (lines 463-92).⁸⁰ The response is, first of all, a justification of the royal wrath: the city's degeneracy required it (lines 499-512). The same perverse rationale is echoed in Walsingham, who says of the citizens, when they had declined to give the king the money his profligacies required,

erant quippe tunc inter omnes fere nationes gentium elatissimi, arrogantissimi, et avarissimi, ac male creduli in Deum et traditiones avitas, Lollardorum sustentatores, religiosorum detractores, decimarum detentores, et communis vulgi depauperatores. In tantum excrevit eorum supercilium, ut auderent leges condere, quibus adventantes de circumjacentibus villis et provinciis, contra rationem omnem humanum, Deum, et justitiam, molestarent, gravarent, et fatigarent. Praetereo eorum inhumanitatem, sileo rapacitatem, reticeo infidelitatem, transeo malignitatem, quam indisciplinate in adventantes populos exercuerunt. Qui si vellem cuncta describere quae perpetraverunt hoc tempore, librum scriberem qui foret, horresco.

[Of all peoples (almost), the Londoners were then indeed the most arrogant, self-important, and avaricious, putting little faith in God and His venerable ways; they were supporters of the Lollards, critics of the religious, tithings-witholders, and general despoilers of the folk. So puffed up was their pride that they made it a matter of law - in the face of all human reason, of God, and of justice itself - to harrass, to burden, and so to grind down all who came there from outlying towns and provinces. They behaved themselves towards those who came to London with such callousness - their inhumanity, I pass over; as to their rapacity, I keep still; of their faithlessness, best not speak; and their malice, let that go too. But it makes me shudder, to think on the book that I could write, were I willing to tell all of the criminality of which they were guilty at that time.]⁸¹

The king is placated by the gifts given him and his queen's imprecations (lines 515-18). He requires the city to treat his nobility better than had been done lately ("Contemptu proceres non habetote meos" ["Don't scorn or hold my lords and nobles in contempt"] - line 520), as in the case of his treasurer, Bishop Waltham; to leave off supporting seditious religious dissent, as mentioned also by Walsingham ("Antiquam servate fidem. Nova dogmata semper / Spernite, que veteres non didicere patres" ["Observe the ancient law. Reject for evermore / New doctrines that the ancient fathers did not learn"] - lines 521-22); and to respect the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the regular orders especially ("Non habet illa [i.e., ecclesia] gradum, quin colat ipse deum" ["It has no sacred rank that does not worship God"] - line 524). He restores the city's "rights," albeit his doing so makes it clear that these are not properly rights but only his royal pleasure (lines 531-36); and he enjoins persistent fear of the royal wrath. Fear is peace, he says; the absence of fear will bring trouble and destruction:

Sit et in urbe mea bona pax - contencio nulla,
   Nec conventiculum federis insoliti.
Si nostras etenim rumor penetraverit aures
   Obvius hiis monitis, urbs luet - haud dubium!

[And in my city let there be fair peace - not strife,
   And no newfangled gatherings in novel leagues.
If any news should reach me that conflicts with this
   Advice, the city will regret it - mark my words!] (Lines 527-30)

Maidstone's Concordia is an apology for this perverse notion, which, as Nigel Saul has argued, was characteristically Ricardian. "In Richard's hands it was turned into a doctrine almost absolutist in tone":

Richard saw the principal object of his government as the establishment of what he referred to as "peace" - unity, in other words - in his realm. And, following Giles [of Rome's De regimine principum], he believed that he could only achieve this if he, the king, was strong and his subjects were obedient to his will. . . . Unity - that is, peace - was incompatible with dissent; what the king required was unquestioning acceptance of his rule and submission to his will.⁸²

The term comes up repeatedly in the Concordia, and always in this peculiar sense: that "pax tribuetur" ["then will peace be yours" - line 54] is the city's initial hope; "Nil nisi pax petitur vestra" ["We seek for nothing but your peace" - line 204], the king is implored; the city's final gift-giving ("In signum pacis quam rogat hic populus" ["To signify the peace which all your people beg" - line 420]) evokes a royal promise of "pax . . . huic urbi, civibus atque meis" ["Let there be peace to London and my citizens" - line 422] but only as long as no rumor of "contencio" ["strife"] breaching "bona pax" ["fair peace" - line 527] reaches the king.

The concord within the city - evoked in Maidstone's poem in his descriptions of the cooperation of all the guilds and all their members in planning and performing the pageant, despite the recently violent, even revolutionary struggle within the city over democratic constitutional reforms; the concord between the city and the Ricardian aristocracy, enjoined in the final royal speech in Maidstone, despite recent violent struggle here too; the concord between the city and the king himself, likewise recently disrupted - all depends on submission to the royally-imposed peace. There is no compromise, even of a sort that would allow for different degrees of power among the elements. Concord means only submission to authority. Such concord, being oppression, could not last, of course. Maidstone's representation is pure ideological myth-making, in Roland Barthes' sense: the poem treats as natural and inevitable something that was, in fact, not natural at all, but a product of particular local historical struggles.⁸³ But Maidstone was not writing history or satire; his was the ideologue's job, of making propaganda.

In his account of the entry, Maidstone incorporated three unscripted occurrences. Presumably selected from amongst numerous such accidents that would have occurred during the course of the day, they were included, not for the sake of reportorial comprehensiveness, but again because they could be made to serve Maidstone's agenda. Maidstone groups his descriptions of two of the three accidents together, as a kind of interlude, following his account of the initial extramural greetings at Wandsworth; the third is inset between the Bridgegate greeting, still outside the city, and the intramural series of fabulous set-pieces to follow; all three accidents are prelude-like announcements of the themes of the main pageant series.

First is a remark about the weather (lines 177-82): a squall of rain saddened the crowd, but it passed quickly by and then "Aura serena micat" ["The atmosphere shone bright" - line 182]. In the reaction of the crowd ("tunc sexus uterque / Turbari metuens turbine tam valido" ["and man and wife / Feared lest they be upset by such a raging storm" - lines 179-80]), Maidstone evokes the fear of King Richard that animated the civic pageantry in general and that would figure prominently in the royal speech concluding his poem; of the weather's clearing, Maidstone makes a comforting point, indirectly, about the king's clemency: "urbs modo nil trepidat" ["the city now was calm" - line 182].

Another of the accidents is more difficult for Maidstone to allegorize. A decorated cart carrying members of the royal entourage tipped over during the procession: a Phaeton must have been driving, Maidstone comments (lines 247-54). People laugh at the discomfiture of others putting on such airs; such accidents remind of common humanity, despite attempts at its denial, and naturally call for celebration, however small. Maidstone's suggestion, though, is that the common laughter was prompted more specifically by sight of the inadvertently bared thighs of one of the tumbled passengers, all of whom were women, he claims, as if what people found really funny was women's public embarrassment. Maidstone's remark might be put down to some commonplace clerical rage, except that Maidstone goes a step further, allegorizing the accident as a morality about the end of degeneracy and erotic indulgence: "Casus et ille placet, veniat (rogo) quod michi signat, / Corruat ut luxus et malus omnis amor" ["So may this lucky fall's significance come true, / And lechery and lustful passion come to grief" - lines 253-54]. Historically, of course, the complaint widely current at the time had to do with the indulgence in luxus and malus amor characteristic of Richard and the male company he kept; most famously, Walsingham complained of them:

Et hi nimirum milites plus erant Veneris quam Bellonae, plus potentes in thalamo quam in campo, plus lingua quam lancea viguerunt, ad dicendum vigiles, ad faciendum acta martia somnolenti.

[But these were knights rather more devoted to Venus than to Bellona, more potent in bed than on the battlefield, mightier of tongue than of lance, full of talk but then rather quiet when it came to actually doing anything war-like.]⁸⁴

Maidstone's allegorical labors over the tipped pageant car make some trivializing acknowledgment of such criticism, and then also, more to the point, turn the criticism away from Richard, arguing implicitly that, though immoral luxus may have been abroad in the kingdom in some form (here, courtly women) and was bound to be thrown down, it had nothing to do with the king himself, who, as his concluding speech makes clear, had come back to the city precisely in order to root out such degeneracy.⁸⁵

The other accident Maidstone admits to his account is the most telling thematically. In Southwark, a banished homicide put himself in the king's way, throwing himself prostrate in front of the king's horse (lines 185-90). The homicide begs pardon of the king, and the king grants it him, there and then, and Maidstone moralizes: "Sicque pium miseri miseret solitum misereri, / Gracia quam tribuit restituatur ei!" ["Thus, kindly, he bestows his kindness on this wretch. / So may the grace that he has shown be shown to him!" - lines 189-90].

Like the weather, this incident too may be taken to hold predictive value for the city: the king was inclining towards mercy. A corollary implication would be that the city must have been as acknowledgedly guilty as the prostrating convict. Beyond the immediate allegorical value the episode had, for characterizing relations between the city and the king, the episode also makes a broader point - the point of the whole poem, in fact - about the nature of King Richard's sovereign power. It is absolute. The king might behave as if he were above and beyond any law, excepting his own will. He is reported to have said as much himself at the time. Regarding the law as being in his own heart and mouth licensed him to do anything he wanted:

[Ricardus] rex, nolens justas leges et consuetudines regni sui servare seu protegere, sed secundum arbitrium suae voluntatis facere quidquid desideriis suis occurrerit, . . . dixit expresse, vultu austero et protervo, quod leges suae erant in ore suo, et aliquotiens, in pectore suo, et quod ipse solus posset mutare et condere leges regni sui.

[King Richard, not wishing to uphold or dispense the rightful laws and customs of the realm, but preferring to act according to his own arbitrary will and to do whatever he wished, . . . declared expressly, with an austere and determined expression, that the laws were in his mouth, or, at other times, that they were in his breast; and that he alone could change or make the laws of his kingdom.]⁸⁶

The cruelties and capricious malfeasance of his tyranny late in the reign are most often cited in evidence of these absolutist ambitions; in fact, his clemencies made the same point. In a brief article devoted to repairing Richard's bad odor in these respects, called "King Richard II of England: A Fresh Look," George Osborn Sayles cites the monarch's spontaneous pardon of a petty palace thief as an instance of his mansuetude, to be set against contemporary episodes of cruelty:

A thief was caught red-handed in Westminster Hall and sentenced to be hanged. And while the deputy marshal of the King's Bench "was in the process of executing the judgment, the king happened to pass by and he ordered him by word of mouth to delay execution." Shortly afterwards the culprit received a royal pardon.⁸⁷

But this anecdote too, like his pardon of the Southwark homicide mentioned in Maidstone's 1392 poem, bespeaks the greater danger about Richard, or his greater glory, depending on one's perspective: in such "arbitrary gestures of grace," as Andrew Galloway has said, "profferred through and as sheer power," Richard's "pity" too becomes "an expression of power." ⁸⁸ By being kind as much as or more than by being cruel, he made manifest the absoluteness of his power. He might do anything he wanted, the greater the range of his doings - the more unpredictable and arbitrary they were - the more absolute his power. The literary job of Maidstone's Concordia is to illustrate and aggrandize this absolute power.


4. Text and Language

The Concordia survives in a single copy, as part of an acephalous manuscript now kept in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, shelf-marked e Musaeo 94 (SC 3631). It consists of twelve parchment folios (with two modern flyleaves), measuring 28 x 20.5 cms, now numbered 1-12, though an earlier foliation, running 121-32, is still visible. It is written throughout in a single hand, an anglicana formata of c. 1400, in a black ink, with headings in red and intermittent drawn large capitals in blue, the writing covering an area measuring 24 x 17 cms, framed and ruled uniformly for two columns per page, of forty-eight lines each. John Bale (1495-1563) had it at one point, though nothing of its provenance is otherwise known until its bequest by Gerard Langbaine (1609-58) to the Bodleian, where it has remained since.⁸⁹ The manuscript's surviving contents are as follows:

1. A concluding section of Maidstone, Protectorium Pauperis (inc. "quod non; si sit persona privata, dicit quod sic, dum"), the whole of which was edited by Williams (see above, note 48) from Oxford, Bodleian Library MS e Musaeo 86 (SC 3629), the so-called Fasciculi Zizaniorum, including collation of what survives of Maidstone's work in this manuscript, fols. 1r-5r.

2. Maidstone, Determinacio contra Magistrum Johannem vicarium ecclesie Sancte Marie Oxoniensis complete (inc. "Utrum Christus enumerans in evangelio pauperes, claudos"), as edited by Edden (see above, note 49), fols. 5r-8v.

3. Maidstone, Concordia complete, fols. 8v-11v.

4. Richard Lavenham, Excerpciones a libro Tullii De natura deorum complete (inc. "Tullius libro primo de natura deorum qui liber sic incipit"), which (to my knowledge) has not been published and is not attested by other copies, fols. 11v-12r. A page prepared for writing, though left blank, follows, fol. 12v.

The contents that survive suggest that the complete manuscript may have been a collection of Maidstone's writings, complete or at least extensive. Bale's lists of the writings of Maidstone that he had seen indicate Maidstone's literary corpus was once lengthy.⁹⁰ Alternatively, in light of the inclusion of Lavenham's Ciceronian excerptiones, the original whole may have been a collection of contemporary English Carmelite writings, including but not restricted to Maidstone's work. The Fasciculi Zizaniorum (also incorporating writings of both Lavenham and Maidstone) is evidence at least for contemporary Carmelite labors at literary preservation of this sort.

This evidence (such as it is) that the surviving manuscript is a compilation already suggests that the text of the Concordia in it is a redacted text, at some remove from an original presentation copy where the Concordia would have appeared by itself that would have been given the king or another patron, such as John of Gaunt, nearer the moment of the poem's occasion. Other evidence internal to the surviving copy of the Concordia corroborates this likelihood that the text we have derives from a second- or subsequent generation copy of Maidstone's poem.

First, the introductory lines 1-14, addressing someone who is both Maidstone's socius and namesake (line 10) - perhaps a Carmelite named Richard, like the Richard Lavenham whose own writing is represented in the same manuscript - suggest after-the-fact circulation for an audience other than the presumptive original royal or patronal audience.⁹¹ The poem proper would originally have begun "M cape, ter quoque C, deciesque novem duo iunge," at what is now line 15, with the roman-numeral dating formula that occurs fairly widely as an opening in contemporary Latin poetry.⁹² The surviving introductory lines 1-14 to Richard socius would have been added later, to address a specially prepared copy of the Concordia to this particular audience. Maidstone may have written other such introductions to cover copies addressed to others, though none are known to survive; other contemporary Anglo-Latin poems do survive, however, with multiple and interchangeable addresses.⁹³ These introductions would or may have been copied independently on separate sheets or new pages; the economical recopying that characterizes the surviving Bodleian manuscript would have led to the once distinctly introductory lines being crowded together with the rest of the poem proper. These considerations suggest that the copy of the Concordia in the Bodleian manuscript derives from a less formal, less official, less public copy that the author addressed to an intimate and equal, which that intimate subsequently made available for recopying into the surviving Bodleian manu-script compilation.

The interlined headings and marginalia of the surviving copy likewise appear to have been added later. In one case, a heading appears to be mistaken: "Hic dantur tabule domine regine eiusdem figure" (before line 429), i.e., of the same Crucifixion scene that was on the altarpiece given the king just before. The words of the custos in the poem itself (especially lines 445-50) imply that the altarpiece given the queen was of a different figure, of St. Anne, an implication confirmed by another source, Knighton (see Appendix 1.3). In others, they are less helpful than might be expected (e.g., the heading before line 45 is premature, that before line 102 is belated, etc.) or idiosyncratic (e.g., there are marginal notes pointing to lists occurring in the poem next to lines 335-36 [musical instruments], 361-62 [trees], and 365-66 [beasts] but not next to lines 81 ff., where the poem's chief list occurs; the demeanor of king and queen is noted marginally next to lines 310-11, though nowhere else; etc.). The distribution of this matter in the surviving copy, as interlined headings or as marginalia, appears also to be idiosyncratic (the ornatus of Chepe and that of Ludgate are noted marginally [next to lines 258-60 and 351-53] whereas other places get interlined rubrics [before lines 269 and 317]; one of the unscripted accidents gets a marginal annotation [next to lines 250-52] whereas the other two get rubricated headings [before lines 177 and 183]), and it may have been determined by considerations of layout peculiar to this manuscript. The two-columned layout - an important economy for the kind of large collection that the Bodleian manuscript once was - makes marginalia difficult to emplace in outer margins, in the very narrow margins at the gutter by the book's spine, or between the columns mid page. Marginalia do not occur in such positions, where there was no room for them. Therefore, the matter treated in the surviving Bodleian manuscript copy as headings may well all once have been marginalia that migrated into interlinear position when there was no marginal room for them. All this suggests that, though the marginalia and headings may yet be authorial in the sense that Maidstone may have written them (or some of them) himself, they are still late, added after the original composition of the poem, calculated to fit it out for circulation amongst a different readership - not actors of the 1392 crisis, but a more distant (clerical, possibly specifically Carmelite) readership that someone like Richard Lavenham might represent.

Consequently, the present edition relegates the headings and marginalia to the textual apparatus (where they are nevertheless reported in full). Instead, the edited text is divided by line spaces into a series of unheaded sections corresponding to the major divisions in the sequence of events, which are in fact usually given a heading or marginal note in the manuscript. The same reasoning ought to lead also to relegation of the opening lines 1-14 similarly to the apparatus. These lines are a separate item bibliographically: optional, belated, and probably having a different publication or circulation history from lines 15-546, though that history cannot now be recovered. Although 1-14 are not part of the Concordia proper, their removal might have confusing practical or other consequences, so they have been kept in the place the manuscript allots them, separated from the rest by line space.

Though the surviving text is somewhat late, it is not greatly so, and the transmission of Maidstone's poem is still not so complex as to have engendered textual confusion. Twice, pentameter lines at least appear to have dropped, and possibly longer passages (after lines 93 and 170), and it may be that the surviving text has other lacunae elsewhere that have gone unnoticed. But no obvious transpositions of lines or couplets would appear to have occurred, nor any garbling within lines.⁹⁴ For the rest, there are only a handful of readings that want correction, and only correction of simple mechanical errors (see the textual apparatus at lines 79, 177, 345, 364, 407, 442, 467, and 471). All such places, where the edited text departs from the manuscript text, are enclosed in brackets [ ], excepting the marks of punctuation, which are editorial, and the expansion of manuscript abbreviations, which are supplied silently throughout the text. The textual apparatus also gives substantive variants from the editions of Thomas Wright, both of 1838 and of 1859, and Charles Roger Smith, of 1972. At line 330, Smith has what appears to be a conjecture, though no explanation is essayed, and Wright's doings are inevitably of interest. He worked quickly - carelessly even, sometimes - and his variant readings in this poem are always transcription errors, errors in the sense that they are not manuscript readings; on the other hand, Wright transcribed so much contemporary Latin poetry that his transcriptional errors occasionally have the quality of conjectures by effect, possibly reflecting a not fully conscious sense on Wright's part of what his author ought to have written, and so possibly yielding guidance to what his author might have written or did write.

A possible advantage of the editorial decisions taken here about representation of the text - admittedly polemic, intended not to be right so much as to enjoin critical thinking about the text - is that, at the expense of the historical occasion, they highlight the work of the poet, which is stylistically significant. The Concordia is written in unrhymed elegiac distychs, and the text is plain in other ways as well, in ways indicative of an intention to open up the subject matter of the poem for a comparatively broad audience. The rhetorical import of the poem's style is anti-hermetic, in other words, meaning not to impress the (clerical, scholastic) few by means of the kind of ornamental hyper-sophistication that can characterize late-medieval Anglo-Latin poetry, but to sway the audience to its propagandistic point of view by plain speaking.

The plain style that Maidstone used, for what remains a formal poem, fundamentally panegyric and official-apologetic, written for an occasion of state, is also a classicizing style in palpable ways, extending from broad structural features of the poem, like the already mentioned emphasis on the oratory of the pageantry's participants, to particulars of versification and syntax, descriptive vocabulary, and patterns of allusion. The classicizing is hardly thoroughgoing or exclusive, nor does it extend to use of the kind of Grecisms, say, or references to antique arcana that can make classicism another hermetic style, performed for the appreciation of the specializedly learned.⁹⁵ Still, the classicizing of Maidstone's poem amounts to an acknowledgment on his part that, for performing formal public poetry, the ancient models (of which he shows his awareness) provided useful stylistic guidance.

In fact, Maidstone's versification has the features that distinguish medieval quantitative Latin poetry:⁹⁶ regularly, there is lengthening before the strong caesura, in both hexameter and pentameter lines (see Appendix 4.1); and there is shortening of certain word-final vowels that were treated as long in classical Latin verse: final -o is consistently short (Appendix 4.2), as is also the final -e of adverbs (Appendix 4.3): Maidstone treated as short the final -e of such words as valde, intime, publice, etc., perhaps by analogy with the commonest adverbs and adverbials, like bene or inde, or forte or sponte, having a short final -e already in ancient practice. Inconsistencies occur, too, though these are few and minor: three instances where e deriving etymologically from the classical Latin diphthong ae is treated as short, though in the rather larger majority of cases this kind of vowel remains long (Appendix 4.4); and a similarly circumscribed number of cases, four, where a word-initial h- appears to have been treated as a consonant, closing and lengthening a preceding word-final syllable (e.g., line 28 nc habet), though again these four are to be set against the tens or dozens of places in the poem where such an h- does not effect this unusual closing (Appendix 4.5). The form nultus occurs once (line 30) but then later appears nultus (line 414); nmis occurs five times (lines 111, 137, 198, 206, 380) though there is also one nmis (line 209); but with these two exceptions, the quantities of the words in Maidstone's lexicon are internally consistent. Little matter, then, that his regularities are not always classical: in fact, there are more than four dozen remaining instances where Maidstone's quantities do not match classical norms (Appendix 4.6). The sample is not long enough for most of these terms to recur, so it may be that some of these quantities are false (like the anomalous nmis) rather than regularities, albeit unclassical ones; still, when these terms do recur, Maidstone treats them consistently: dio in various forms (lines 26, 146, 416), trnus in various forms (lines 319, 459, 495; from CL thrnus), and oblique cases of plebs with a persistently short stem-vowel (lines 426, 489, 532). As in these instances, the majority of Maidstone's "false" quantities involve stem-vowels, where he would have had little or no lexicographic guidance to classical norms. Getting such quantities "right" in his own practice might have been possible by closer application to the study of ancient verse. But Maidstone's prosody ought not to be measured against any putative classical ideal. Ancient norms are not pertinent. Maidstone's prosody is sufficiently consistent internally to be recognizably good quantitative Latin poetry, painstaking even (Maidstone avoids elision, for example, all but completely: the single instance is "senatorio, urbs" [line 73]); moreover, the standard Maidstone's verse achieves is not idiosyncratic but was sanctioned by the contemporary practice of other Latin poets.

Though for the most part Maidstone avoids it, there is still a little rhyme. There are three properly disyllable-rhymed leonine lines ("Quales texture picturarumque figure" [line 265], for example; also lines 182 and 397). Mostly, however, Maidstone's rhymes involve only single syllables ("Pinxerat hic celum arte iuvante novum" [line 62], for example; also lines 63, 75, 181, 238, 272), of a sort that could hardly be avoided and is hardly noticeable. The exception may be the poem's final six lines, each of which has single-syllable rhyme of strong caesura with line-ending (though "Sint sibi felices anni mensesque diesque" [line 543] squints), yielding perhaps a heightened sense of imminent conclusion. However, there is none of the ostentatious couplet rhyming that characterizes more mannered Latin verse, of line-endings nor of consecutive caesuras (but see lines 181-82), nor of cross-rhyming caesuras and line-endings. Alliteration is restricted to the closing couplet of the detachable verse exordium (lines 13-14) and to the passage describing the brief storm (lines 177-80), where occurs the sequence Tunc - tristis - Tempestas - turbinis - tristis - tunc - Turbari - turbine - tam valido.

The middle or plain way that this treatment of rhyme represents - not much, one way or the other, but nothing exclusive - is characteristic of Maidstone's style generally. He is capable of an egregious mannerism like "Westquemonasterium" (line 454), yielding a four-word pentameter, fully half of which is given over to this one term, with the properly enclitic -que embedded in it; nevertheless, there is but the one example. Also, there are instances of paranomasiastic wordplay - "Quis numerare queat numerum turbe numerose" (line 67), for example; likewise "Sicque pium miseri miseret solitum misereri" (line 189) and "Femina feminea sua dum sic femina nudat" (line 251) - but even these lines are not hard, and three of them in over five hundred lines represents restraint.⁹⁷ Syntactically, too, Maidstone's work is plain: for the most part, he favors simple declarative statements, simple compounding sentences, consecutive clause arrangement (rather than embedding), and prosaic word orders, without taxing hyperbaton. The preponderantly dactylic rhythms of Maidstone's lines (Appendix 4.7) probably also contribute to the impression of lightness or conversational ease about the verse, by contrast with the more ponderous, incantory effects that heavily spondaic lines can yield.⁹⁸

The vocabulary admits various English-derived or otherwise contemporary terms, of a sort that would or could not have occurred in Republican or Augustan writers. The terms occur thickly where Maidstone describes or mentions contemporary institutions and practices; for example, in the passages describing the mysterii ("guilds") arrayed to welcome King Richard (lines 79-95). The passage listing the guilds also contains most of the somewhat recherché Grecisms Maidstone resorts to: apothecarius (line 83), zonarius (line 89), pandoxator (line 91), and cirotecarius (line 94), for example.⁹⁹ These are not numerous, and Maidstone uses Latinized English words here too, like carpentarius (line 85) and candelarius (line 90). When dealing even with contemporary institutions and practices, however, Maidstone favors classicizing references: the London aldermen - Maidstone does use aldirmannos (line 72) - are represented as a senatus (line 73), going about London - usually called New Troy (lines 11, 17, 39, and 123, though compare 20 and 148) ¹⁰⁰ - toga-clad (lines 76, 132, 165); and King Richard finally addresses the assembled senatus populusque of the city from a tribunal (line 461). Phoebus appears (line 17) in the middle of a passage in which a date is given medieval-style (lines 15-19), rather than in terms of calends and ides; on the other hand, Maidstone gives a distance in stadia (line 101), though evidently he uses the term to mean "paces," and the direction of the wind is given, not in compass-points, but in poetic Roman terms: Nothus and Favonius (line 181).

Likewise, the allusions in the poem tend to be more literary than scriptural, and the literary ones tend to be classical, though they are not exclusively so. The only biblical references not imposed on Maidstone by the pageantry itself (e.g., John the Baptist's ejaculation "Agnus et ecce dei" [line 372], confirmed by the other sources) are the likenings of Queen Anne to Esther (line 441)¹⁰¹ and of King Richard once to Solomon (line 38) and again later to Absolon (line 112). Maidstone mentions St. Erkenwald (line 348), to whose shrine the procession took the king, and in honor of whose cult a surviving Middle English poem had just been or was just about to be written;¹⁰² unprompted by events, Maidstone also likens King Richard to Troilus (line 112), lately lent prominence by the single major poem Chaucer actually finished, c. 1385, and made public. King Arthur's name comes up, along with that of his Trojan forebear Brutus (lines 479-80); for the most part, however, the references are to antiquities: Amazons, Phaeton, Venus, and Mars put in appearances (lines 123, 250, 117, and 98 respectively); King Richard comes to the city also like a Paris (line 26) and a Caesar (line 200); Tethys is away, and instead the city's conduits run with Bacchus (line 269). The surviving introductory lines quote Cicero by name (lines 1-6) - a figure evidently of special interest to Lavenham - and the one embedded quotation in the poem I find is from Ovid (line 293).

To have made King Richard a Caesar come again, like making the civic delegation that greeted him a senate, was to magnify. Maidstone's classicism generally had this as one of its effects: it served to decorate and so to honor the occasion, as did also his decision to write verse, as did also his decision to write at all. However taken, by authorial initiative or by official commission, this decision had a double consequence, legible in the poem: it enjoined glorifying the monarch and also reaching out to a public. The classicizing plain style served both ends. Maidstone's Concordia shows Anglo-Latin poetry, on a specific occasion, in the process of making itself a public poetry - a broadly appealing, flexible, legible medium for addressing public issues.¹⁰³

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