Writing to the King: Nation, Kingship and Literature in England 1250-1350 (review)

David Matthews adroitly combines literary criticism and historical analysis in this study of rhetorical appeals to England's Plantagenet monarchs. One of the author's principal aims is to examine a range of lesser-known works from the period c. 1250-1350, many of which had attracted the attention of nineteenth-century critics but subsequently fell from favour. Matthews argues that the more recent extension of critical interest to the literature of the fifteenth century needs to be matched by paying greater attention to English literary output in the century or so before the activities of Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Gawain poet (and before, to use the author's own phrase, the 'Ricardian explosion of vernacularity', p. 158). The formation of a view that gives coherence to a literary period spanning approximately 1350-1550, while commendable in eroding the traditional medieval/Tudor boundary, implicitly denies the possibility of finding worthwhile objects of study in the preceding period. This is the oversight which Matthews intends to correct.

In doing so, he turns frequently to the two major themes indicated by his subtitle: kingship and nationhood. The organising motif of 'writing to the king' refers to the narrative voices in many of the works under consideration, which often apostrophize the monarch or those close to him. For Matthews, these texts form part of a 'tradition of public critique' (p. 12) which uses the device of direct personal address while in reality speaking to a much wider English political community. While the author is concerned to trace the rise of national sentiment from the thirteenth century, he notes that a sense of Englishness did not necessarily find itself expressed in English. Latin and Anglo-Norman works are equally important contributors to the cultural milieu that Matthews identifies.

The Latin text known as The Song of Lewes, for example, comments at length on the limits that should be placed on kingship. In clearly supporting Simon de Montfort and the baronial party that had been victorious at Lewes in 1264, it thus places itself firmly in the tradition of Magna Carta. To complicate matters further, it lionizes a Frenchman (de Montfort) as a heroic figure defending the English nation against royalist tyranny, personified not by Henry III himself but by his brother and son (Richard of Cornwall and the Lord Edward). After de Montfort's death, other texts represented him as a martyr figure, almost another Becket, simultaneously criticizing royal policy and creating a hero of English liberties from the figure of a dead French aristocrat.

After this discussion of the Barons' War of the 1260s, the chapters proceed both chronologically and thematically, involving consideration of literary responses to Edward I's Scottish campaigns, the failures of Edward II, and the early years of Edward III. The final two chapters highlight an interesting thematic contrast in works from the early fourteenth century. Chapter 4 focuses on a widespread literature of complaint against social and economic conditions in the pre-plague period. Typical is the so-called 'Song of the Husbandman' which adopts the narrative persona of peasants bewailing excessive taxation and official expropriation of their meagre assets. Poems in this genre, Matthews notes, lack any strong national sensibility, concentrating instead on 'kingship's impact on a local community or class fraction' (p. 134). In this context, 'writing to the king' is the expression of grievance, although the king himself is often shielded from blame by the common pre-modern motif of shifting antagonism onto nefarious but nebulous 'evil counsellors'.

The contrasting set of works, discussed in Chapter 5, is more approving in its attitude to the monarch and displays a much more self-conscious nationalism, albeit one that is contingent and not yet fully formed. Here the poetry of Laurence Minot is prominent. Minot, the 'poor man's Froissart' (p. 137), has not been to the taste of modern...