The Parlement of the Thre Ages and
Wynnere and Wastoure are the last two items in British Library Additional MS 31042, a miscellany of religious histories, verse romances, poems by John Lydgate, carols, and other devotional or ethical poems, all compiled by Robert Thornton, probably around 1450.
1 Thornton was a man of some prestige in Yorkshire; if, as seems likely, he copied these works for himself and his family, his collection is a good example of the fondness which the English middle class had for devotional literature and historical romance in the late Middle Ages.
2
Thornton's version of
Wynnere and Wastoure is unique;
The Parlement of the Thre Ages, however, also exists in an incomplete and later, inferior version, which now is British Library Additional MS 33994 but formerly was part of the library of Sir James Ware, who died in 1666. Both
Wynnere and
Parlement share very nearly the same dialect; the language is that of the Midlands, though scholars disagree about its exact provenance. Suggested locations range from the North Central Midlands, possibly Nottinghamshire, to "somewhere not very far from where the counties of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire meet," to the North-West Midlands, to the East Midlands.
3 As a Northerner, Thornton sometimes introduces his own distinctive forms, just as the original poet accepted a number of Southern forms which had become part of the language of London. In any case, even if the locale of the language could be fixed precisely, the mixture of forms, as the most recent editor of
Wynnere and Wastoure has said, suggests that this poet, like other writers of alliterative verse, was not isolated in the provinces but quite mobile (Trigg, p. xxii). When compared to other poems on contemporary issues, which tend to be "intensely provincial [and] hometown,"
Wynnere and Wastoure certainly seems national, even international in its outlook.
4 More than one might at first suppose, the dialect of
Wynnere and
The Parlement of the Thre Ages as well looks beyond narrow regionalism.
The close similarity of language and meter, in addition to the resemblances between Wynnere and Wastoure, in the poem bearing their names, and Medill Elde and Youthe, in
Parlement, led the poems' first editor, Sir Israel Gollancz, to believe that they are by the same author. There is, however, no convincing evidence to support this conclusion; at most one can say with M. Y. Offord, who summarizes discussion of the question of authorship in her edition of
The Parlement of the Thre Ages, that
Parlement was composed by someone who spoke the same dialect as the poet of
Wynnere.5
As for the date of the poems, the longstanding assumption has been that
Wynnere and Wastoure was the earlier poem; just when
Wynnere was composed, however, has provoked a great deal of controversy.
Wynnere contains elements of topical satire; Gollancz in fact thought that it was aimed specifically at Edward III and the Black Prince and their handling of events, both foreign and domestic, during the winter of 1352-53. The poem does indeed seem to comment on economic and political conditions in the wake of the Black Death, which struck England in 1348-49. Labor was in short supply in the years following the plague's outbreak, and many workers would break contracts and journey to wherever wages were highest; at the same time, bands of criminals, not only of the lower classes but of the urban and country gentry as well, were causing alarming mayhem.
6 Parliament passed a number of measures in response; among the most important were The Statute of Laborers in 1351 and The Statute of Treasons in 1352.
7 Both these laws, but especially the former, created a great deal of resentment, some of which was directed at William Shareshull (prominently mentioned in the poem at line 317), who as Chief Justice was instrumental in their promulgation.
8 In fact, Wastoure's vehement denial that he has disturbed the peace (lines 317-18) has been taken to refer both to the Treasons Statute and to an uprising in Chester in 1353 (the only insurrection to have occurred in the West between 1349 and 1365), which Shareshull had a part in provoking. But the conditions these acts of Parliament addressed persisted at least until Shareshull died in 1370, which establishes a fairly certain
terminus ad quem for the poem; for a
terminus a quo, the best we can say is that
Wynnere, which does seem to allude to the Statute of Treasons (in lines 126ff.), was probably not composed earlier than 1352.
9
Similarly, nothing about the situation abroad can help to determine the date with greater precision.
Wynnere does reflect how dependent Edward III had become on merchants to finance his expeditions in France during The Hundred Years' War. Indeed, to raise money without Parliament's involvement, Edward had even tried to form an Estate of Merchants; this group played so important a part in the parliaments of 1352-54, it began to rival the Commons.
10 But the war with France commanded Edward's attention until his death; both he and Richard II after him depended on merchants throughout the rest of the fourteenth century. There is little to prove that the poem's descriptions refer specifically to Edward's campaign in 1353.
The Parlement of the Thre Ages, however, is not topical; nothing in it can allow fixing a date more definite than between 1352-53 and about 1390. Offord thinks it probable that the poem was composed before 1370, but acknowledges this as supposition. Indeed, she points out that we cannot even be sure that
Wynnere did in fact precede
The Parlement. In the end, arguments for placing one poem before the other rest more on editorial ideas of evolution than on the data of the works; in this the relationship between
Wynnere and Wastoure and
The Parlement of the Thre Ages echoes the recent discussions on the development of alliterative poetry in Middle English in general. Influence cannot be determined with certainty.
11
In both
Wynnere and Wastoure and
The Parlement of the Thre Ages, a solitary narrator falls asleep and witnesses in his dream a verbal altercation about current social abuses and defects of the spirit. The poems are thus complaints that combine at least two medieval genres, the dream vision and the poetic debate: much critical commentary has sought to elucidate how generic expectations are met or modified in each poem.
That both poems have produced interpretations quite at odds with one another is not surprising, since both dream visions and the poetic debate have venerable and complicated histories. The purpose of each was to teach, yet from the start both also called into question the certainty of their instruction and the degree to which we can rely on the person who gives or receives it. Dreams could carry the authority of divine revelation or be the unreliable products of wish fulfillment.
12 Debates could resolve the issue under question decisively or leave it in doubt.
13 As a consequence, suspicions about the reliability of the dreamer or disputants could readily be entertained, even when the wisdom of what they said seemed unimpeachable.
Moreover, the prologues of both poems have much in common with the traditional "chanson d'aventure," in which a narrator, wandering alone, hears a bird-song, or meets a lady, or reads a message on a wall, or overhears a complaint or debate. As Anne Middleton says, the speaker "happens on truth or transformation unawares, in a place, time and state of mind where it was least looked for" (p. 114). Consequently, a "poem in this mode does not present authoritative truth to cognition . . . its definitive features are that its speaker has no authority and that the truth of its discourse is purely contingent" (pp. 114-15).
In
Wynnere and Wastoure and
The Parlement of the Thre Ages, therefore, generic affiliations multiply rather than simplify the complexities of interpretation even before we discover the particular concerns of each poem. In
Wynnere, for instance, it is hard to decide which combatant should win the debate; the manuscript ends before the king can complete his determination, and what he does say, considering that he himself both wins and wastes, leaves the argument between getting and spending appropriately unresolved. The poem's perspectives are truly dizzying: on the one hand, economics, politics, ethics, and social relations are seen as an interrelated set of universal, timeless principles; on the other, they appear as actual, contingent conditions that have resulted from specific acts in history. As allegorical personifications, Wynnere attempts to portray himself as desirable gain and Wastoure as sheer Prodigality; Wastoure in turn pictures Wynnere as pure Avarice and himself as efficacious expenditure. Their altercation inevitably recalls Aristotle's ethical axiom that liberality, which is the mean between the excesses of both vices, is the proper guide to conduct. But Wynnere and Wastoure debate before the king: at times their arguments seem less philosophical and more a pointed comment on the constant tension between the two main departments of Edward III's household. The lord chamberlain was responsible for outlays that guaranteed, as one source puts it, the "king's magnificence"; the lord steward was responsible for the actual running of the king's household and insuring his "providence."
14 Yet Edward's need for money to make war in France also gave his domestic affairs a larger political dimension: in Simon Islip's
De Speculo Regis Edwardi III, for instance, he is called "avarus," an avaricious man, and "prodigus," because of his abuse of purveyance to raise money and because of the extravagancy of his household expenses.
15 Then again, some of Wastoure's barbs against Wynnere show that the rising status of merchants was a real cause for concern among those who still believed in the sanctioned social hierarchy. And so it goes: in each of the four exchanges between Wynnere and Wastoure the universal is set alongside the particular, as specific economic, political, and social disorders are condemned by appealing to ethical and religious ideals. To try to follow their debate, much less to resolve it, without invoking a multitude of perspectives seems as doomed to partiality as are Wynnere's and Wastoure's own arguments.
In
The Parlement of the Thre Ages, religious and moral standards are invoked to highlight the degradation of social abuses in a somewhat different way; consequently, problems of interpretation have taken a different form. Older studies (e.g., Speirs and Everett) commended the lively realism of
The Parlement of the Thre Ages, especially the descriptions of the hunt and the brittling of the deer, but faulted the lack of proportion they saw in its construction. To them, little connects the prologue with the debate that follows it, and Elde's disquisition on the Nine Worthies was over-long in itself and not relevant to the issues about which Youthe, Medill Elde, and Elde quarrel. More recently, however, a number of studies have argued that the poet carefully anticipates the argument of the dream in the hunt of the prologue (e.g., Peck and Lampe), and that Elde's speech does in fact address and effectively answer both Youthe and Medill Elde (e.g., Kiser). The grave battles of the Nine Worthies, for instance, set Youthe's penchant for tournaments in sober context; so too does Medill Elde's preoccupation with land and control of his household seem small and misconceived when one considers that the Worthies possessed and ruled the entire world yet lost everything when they died.
But even if we grant that Elde effectively silences Youthe and Medill Elde and thereby wins the debate, he himself nonetheless seems self-involved and given to the vices of old age. Elde shows that in the face of death the extravagance of youth and the industry of middle age are equally vain, yet the very decisiveness of the answer prompts a further question. How can a character able to formulate such commendable truths still be given to anger and envy (line 163)?
For this edition, only a highly simplified discussion of the poems' meter is appropriate.
16 The most common type of line has four or five main stresses, three of which alliterate. All lines have a break somewhere mid-line; the half-line that follows the break is usually shorter and contains at least two stresses. Consonants alliterate with themselves, as do certain groups of consonants (e.g.,
sp, st, sw).
17 Any vowel alliterates with any other vowel and, in
Parlement (but
not in
Wynnere), with mute "h" in words of French origin (
herbere —
anone —
aftir, Parlement line 74).
Alliterating stresses fall into numerous patterns. By far the most common is
aa/ax. There are many variations: the one I will comment on here, because it affects the editing of the text, is the pattern
aa/xx. The most recent editor of
Wynnere, Stephanie Trigg, does not accept this pattern unless a number of conditions are met. I, however, accept it throughout for two reasons. First,
Wynnere itself provides too small a statistical sample to be certain that the poet did not allow this pattern. Second, if one expands one's base and takes
The Parlement into account, one finds that the pattern
aa/xx occurs sixteen times in this poem, frequently enough to make Offord say that the poet may indeed have recognized the type.
18 Even if the poems are by different authors, their metrics in other respects are close enough to conclude that emending the text to remedy an otherwise acceptable line of the
aa/xx type does not seem warranted.
For this edition, I have followed the guidelines of the Middle English Text Series in printing the modern equivalents of thorns, edhs, and yoghs, and in rationalizing the distribution of i/j and u/v in accordance with modern spellings. All abbreviations have been silently expanded, with one notable exception: in words with medial -n- or -m-, it is seldom clear how or whether to expand the curved stroke that often appears above it. I have therefore ignored it throughout. The division into paragraphs follows the MS, where divisions are indicated by a large capital. The text is heavily glossed; unfamiliar words that have not been regularly glossed after their third occurrence appear in the glossary.
Although I have had the advantage of being able to consult two fine editions, Trigg's of
Wynnere and Wastoure and Offord's of
The Parlement of the Thre Ages, I have nevertheless established the text of each poem by consulting the manuscript itself and a microfilm of it. All emended readings are discussed in the notes.