7 - English Poetry in Late Summer 1399

Summary

A “part of the Lancastrian aim of legitimation” may have been taken on by the English poets, Helen Barr suggested – including poets other than John Gower, whose Cronica tripertita will turn out to be unequivocally involved in the Lancastrian programme – testifying “again to the accute importance of the control of such texts to the Lancastrian hegemony.” “The successful legitimation of Henry's usurpation was dependent on the activities of a carefully managed parliament,” demonstrably by means of the Westminster deliberative bureau in which Adam Usk worked, “and on the equally careful management of the texts and documents recording and disseminating that parliamentary activity,” as indicated by the numerous varied forms in which the “Record and Process” and its component parts were recirculated, as Frank Grady has written; setting aside John Gower's own contemporary literary activities, the century-long tradition of the poets' participation in state affairs, as verse-propagandistic volunteers and occasional official agents, would suggest that they should have been so employed, in propagating state-views of the Lancastrian advent. It happens, moreover, that, at just the same moment when the Henrician writs of chronicle-research went out from Westminster in August 1399, there comes in some evidence to the effect that poets may have been so employed.

Once or twice might be taken for accidents of partisan enthusiasm; more, an appearance of conspiracy enters in; and there survive five contemporary local poems, all sharing the same curious array of properties.