Out of the Mouths of Babes: Authority in Pearl and in Narratives of the Child King Richard

Summary

Authority is a word on everyone’s lips today. The young attack it and the old demand respect for it. Parents have lost it and policemen enforce it. Experts claim it and artists spurn it, while scholars seek it and lawyers cite it. Philosophers reconcile it with liberty and theologians demonstrate its compatibility with conscience. Bureaucrats pretend they have it and politicians wish they did. Everybody agrees there is less of it than there used to be.

Such is a portrait of authority in contemporary western society painted by John Schaar, a political philosopher of our own day. In marked contrast, the general perception of authority in the late Middle Ages is of an authoritative framework grounded in a commonly accepted, traditional hierarchy: God over king, king over subject, man over woman, parent over child, age over youth, noble over commoner, lord over serf. However, in this essay I shall examine three narratives from the late fourteenth century where it appears that authority based on that traditional hierarchy was being questioned, where the hierarchy itself is represented as being either suspended or subverted. In these narratives, the customary structure of authority is brought into question because the protagonists are children, and the circumstances of the narratives demand that these children be constructed as figures of authority. The narratives are the late fourteenth-century English dream-vision poem Pearl, and chronicle accounts of the coronation of the boy king Richard II in 1377, and of incidents involving the king which occurred during the Peasants’ Uprising in 1381. This essay is an exploration of some intriguing parallels between Pearl and the Ricardian narratives, with the intention of discovering how customary representations of the hierarchy of power are contested in order to invest a child with authority. I shall also consider how the authorizing of a child in these narratives reflects a questioning of traditional patterns of authority in the larger culture. I hope not to wring from any of these narratives meanings that others cannot also discover, or to wrench them out of shape to fit my thesis. Nevertheless, I am aware that the risk is there.