Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-f46jp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-13T10:09:56.529Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

16 - Vox populi and the literature of 1381

from III - INSTITUTIONAL PRODUCTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
David Aers
Edited by
David Wallace
David Wallace
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
Get access

Summary

homo secundum suam naturam est animal politicum [human beings are by nature political animals]

St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I–ii.61.5

This chapter addresses ways in which those excluded from the dominant institutions and cultures of discourse made themselves heard in England during the period after the Black Death. The excluded, who comprised the vast majority of people, rarely left written statements disclosing their projects and assumptions, their motives, their hopes and fears. We tend to encounter the excluded only as they affect the perceptions, needs and goals of those who sought to govern them, to rule their bodies and souls. The governing classes, together with those who directly served their interests, tended only to take note of plebeian communities and individuals as those on whom their own forms of life depended, those whom they had to coerce into yielding up rents, fines, taxes, labour-power and tithes. Most of the ruled lived in self-governing, self-policing rural communities which had customarily sought to resist these extractions through a wide range of strategies. In the later fourteenth century customary struggles were pursued in radically changed circumstances.

These were shaped by the Black Death and ensuing plagues which probably killed up to half the population. This human catastrophe led to unprecedented opportunities for wage-labourers and servants to improve their standards of living, for villeins to challenge their customary status and services, and for more substantial agriculturists, free or bond, to improve the conditions on which they rented land, and to accumulate holdings. These new opportunities encouraged increasing self-confidence and determination on the part of the ruled, while the governing classes inevitably met this threat to their incomes with the full range of resources at their disposal – political, legal and ideological.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature , pp. 432 - 453
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aers, David. Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination. London: Routledge, 1980.Google Scholar
Aers, David. Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360–1430. London: Routledge, 1988.Google Scholar
Baldwin, Anna P.The Theme of Government in ‘Piers Plowman’. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1981.Google Scholar
Bishop, Ian. ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale and the Liberal Arts’. Review of English Studies n.s. 30 (1979).Google Scholar
Bloch, R. Howard. Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bolton, J. L.The Medieval English Economy, 1150–1500. London: Dent, 1980.Google Scholar
Britnell, R. H.The Commercialisation of English Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Brooks, N. ‘The Organizations and Achievements of the Peasants of Kent and Essex in 1381’. In Mayr-Harting, H. and Moore, R. I. (eds.), Studies in Medieval History. London: Hambledon, 1985.Google Scholar
Camille, Michael. ‘Labouring for the Lord: The Ploughman and the Social Order in the Luttrell Psalter’. Art History 10 (1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Camille, Michael. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Gen. Ed. Benson, Larry D.. 3rd edn Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.Google Scholar
Clark, Elaine. ‘Medieval Labor Law and English Local Courts’. American Journal of Legal History 27 (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coleman, Janet. English Literature in History: 1350–1400. London: Hutchinson, 1981.Google Scholar
Delany, Sheila. Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Dobson, E. J.The Origins of ‘Ancrene Wisse’. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.Google Scholar
Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Dyer, Christopher. ‘The Rising of 1381 in Suffolk: Its Origins and Participants’. Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History 36 (1988).Google Scholar
Dyer, Christopher. Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c. 1200–1520. Cambridge Medieval Textbooks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, R. F.The Dream of Chaucer.Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Fisher, John H.John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer.New York: New York University Press, 1964.Google Scholar
Furber, E. C. (ed.). Essex Sessions of the Peace, 1351, 1377–79. Colchester: Essex Archaeological Society, 1953.Google Scholar
Ganim, John M.Chaucerian Theatricality.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani. Ed. Riley, H. T.. Rolls Series 24.4, vol. III. London: Longmans, Green, 1869.Google Scholar
Gower, John. Mirour de l’Omme. Trans. Wilson, William Burton. East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Gower, John. The Complete Works of John Gower. Ed. Macaulay, G. C.. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899–1902.Google Scholar
Gower, John. The Major Latin Works of John Gower. Trans. Stockton, Eric W.. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962.Google Scholar
Gradon, P. ‘Langland and the Ideology of Dissent’. PBA 66 (1980).Google Scholar
Harding, Alan. The Law Courts of Medieval England.Historical Problems: Studies and Documents 18. London: Allen and Unwin, 1973.Google Scholar
Hilton, Rodney H.Bond Men Made Free.London: Temple Smith, 1973.Google Scholar
Hilton, Rodney H.The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Hilton, Rodney H., and Aston, T. H. (eds.). The English Rising of 1381.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Historia Anglicana. Ed. Riley, H. T.. 2 vols. Rolls Series 28. London: Longman, Green, 1863.Google Scholar
Hudson, Anne. The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Justice, Steven. Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381.Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Kaeuper, R. W.War, Justice and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. Ed. Meech, Sanford Brown and Allen, Hope Emily. Early English Text Society (Original Series) 212. London: Oxford University Press, 1940.Google Scholar
Kirk, E. D. ‘Langland’s Plowman and the Recreation of Fourteenth-century Religious Metaphor’. The Yearbook of Langland Studies 2 (1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knight, Stephen. Geoffrey Chaucer.Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.Google Scholar
Kress, G.Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural Practice.Victoria: Deakin University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Kress, G., and Hodge, R.. Language as Ideology.London: Routledge, 1979.Google Scholar
Langland, William. ‘Piers Plowman’: The B Version. Ed. Kane, George and Donaldson, E. Talbot. London: Athlone Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Maddicott, J. R.The English Peasantry and the Demands of the Crown, 1294–1341.Oxford: Past and Present Supplement, 1975.Google Scholar
Mann, Jill. Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McNiven, Peter. Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV.Woodbridge: Boydell, 1987.Google Scholar
Miller, E., and Hatcher, J. (eds.). Medieval England: Rural Society and Economic Change 1086–1348. London: Longman, 1978.Google Scholar
Mohl, R.The Three Estates in Medieval and Renaissance Satire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.Google Scholar
Muscatine, Charles. Chaucer and the French Tradition. Berkeley: California University Press, 1957.Google Scholar
Nicholls, Jonathan W.The Matter of Courtesy. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985.Google Scholar
Olson, Paul A.‘The Canterbury Tales’ and the Good Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Owst, G. R.Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1933; 2nd rev. edn 1961.Google Scholar
Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Pearsall, Derek. The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992.Google Scholar
Poos, Lawrence R.A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex 1350–1525. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poos, Lawrence R. ‘The Social Context of Statute of Labourers Enforcement’. Law and History Review 1 (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Postan, M. M.The Medieval Economy and Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.Google Scholar
Powell, Edgar. The Rising in East Anglia in 1381. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896.Google Scholar
Putnam, B. H.The Enforcement of the Statute of Labourers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1908.Google Scholar
Putnam, B. H. ‘Maximum Wage–Laws for Priests after the Black Death, 1348–1381’. American Historical Review 21 (1915–16).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Putnam, B. H. (ed.). Proceedings Before the Justices of the Peace in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. London: Spottiswoode, Ballantyne and Co., 1935.Google Scholar
Richardson, H. G. ‘Heresy and the Lay Power under Richard II’. English Historical Review 51 (1936).Google Scholar
Rotuli Parliamentorum. Ed. Strachey, J.. 6 vols. London: 1767–77.Google Scholar
Scanlon, Larry. Narrative, Authority and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scase, Wendy. Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Sigmund, P. E.St Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics. New York: Norton, 1988.Google Scholar
Sillem, R. (ed.). Records of some Sessions of the Peace in Lincolnshire, 1360–1375. Hereford: Lincoln Record Society, 1936.Google Scholar
Sinfield, Alan. Faultline: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading.Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Sitwell, G. ‘Chaucer’s Plowman and the Contemporary English Peasant’. English Historical Review 6 (1939).Google Scholar
Spearing, A. C.Medieval Dream-Poetry.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.Google Scholar
Spearing, A. C.The Medieval Poet as Voyeur.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Specht, H.Poetry and the Iconography of the Peasant.Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1983.Google Scholar
Stallybrass, Peter. ‘Drunk with a Cup of Liberty: Robin Hood, the Carnivalesque, and the Rhetoric of Violence’. In Armstrong, N. and Tennenhouse, L. (eds.), The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence,. London: Routledge, 1989.Google Scholar
Strohm, Paul. Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strohm, Paul. Social Chaucer.Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Tanner, N. P. (ed.). Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–1431. Camden Society 4th series 20. London, 1977.Google Scholar
The Statutes of the Realm (1235–1713). Ed. Luders, Alexander SirTomlins, T. E., France, John, Taunton, W. E. and Raithby, John. 10 vols. London: Record Commission, 1810–28.Google Scholar
Travis, Peter. ‘Chaucer’s Trivial Fox Chase and the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381’. Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 18 (1988).Google Scholar
Volosinov, V.Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.London: Seminar Press, 1973.Google Scholar
Wallace, David. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy.Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Walsh, P. G.Andreas Capellanus on Love.London: Duckworth, 1982.Google Scholar
Wilkins, David (ed.). Concilia Magnae Brittaniae et Hiberniae. 4 vols. London: R. Gosling, 1737.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×