Appendix

Summary

Definitive new conclusions on the dating of the Upland Series must await the broader recontextualization that a new edition will be able to provide. There is, however, strong evidence for overturning Heyworth's datings and proposing an alternative hypothesis.

At the very least the version of Jack Upland to which Woodford replies must have been written before Woodford replied to it: the set of sixty-five questions in Latin must therefore have been written by the early 1390s, or even, if we trust (as Eric Doyle does not) Woodford's statement that he wrote his reply in 1385, by the early 1380s. It is entirely possible that both vernacular and Latin versions were available when Woodford wrote, and even that a vernacular version may have preceded the Latin version: Woodford might, like Dymmok and Maidstone, have translated his opponent's arguments before replying to them. All the extant versions of Jack Upland must obviously postdate Fitzralph's antifraternal writings of the 1350s, and as chapter five has shown, the work's closest ideological ties are with vernacular Wycliffite writings of the late fourteenth century, as well as the larger extraclergial trend, in which Wycliffite texts are such an important component, toward providing sustained complex argumentation in the vernacular coupled with provocative claims to untutored simplicity. It seems most probable, then, that the versions of Jack Upland available to us were produced or revised in the early 1380s to early 1390s. There could have been earlier, shorter versions: Wendy Scase has suggested that Jack Upland mimics the form of earlier lists of polemic questions in Latin.