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  • The Account Book and the Treasure: Gilbert Maghfeld's Textual Economy and the Poetics of Mercantile Accounting in Ricardian Literature
  • Andrew Galloway

It would be hard to find a better example of a single book standing as witness to the social and economic networks of late fourteenth-century London—and to the involvement of the region's major literary figures in them—than the account book for July 4, 1390–June 23, 1395, of Gilbert Maghfeld, ironmonger, credit broker, and money-lender.1 The book is filled with “accomptes” of the transactions linking Maghfeld to numerous social spheres in London, Westminster, and Southwark, from silkwomen to the king, and to a number of known London writers—Chaucer, Gower, and Henry Scogan, and fleetingly, as can be shown for the first time, Thomas Usk as well. All were linked to Maghfeld by his professional roles as merchant, alderman, customs official, keeper of the sea, then royally appointed sheriff when the king took over London's administration in 1392. Predominantly, however, these individuals and their communities were connected to Maghfeld by his moneylending services, on which Maghfeld built his later career before his financial collapse and death in 1397.

This essay seeks to show that this unparalleled glimpse of Ricardian mercantile documentary culture can also reveal some central historical, [End Page 65] ideological, and narrative features of Ricardian literature that would otherwise be far less visible, as Maghfeld's book itself has been in literary scholarship for more than eighty years. Maghfeld has gained some attention in economic history for his sprawling social affiliations, and most recently for illustrating the dangers of overextended credit in late medieval London.2 But literary scholars’ attention to his book flourished only long ago, in the work of Edith Rickert and John Manly, whose narrowly topical search for the “models” of Chaucer's characters among the denizens of late fourteenth-century London seems to have sunk wider literary-historical study of him.3 For decades thereafter, the city and its mercantile culture generally receded from literary criticism's view; when the city reemerged, it has often been as a problem or erasure, summed up by David Wallace's assertion of an “absent city.”4

There are good reasons for Wallace's bold phrase. The sense of an English mercantile world that is elusive or erased in the literature, and displaced or fragmented in its wider historical reality by partisan, religious, courtly, and authoritarian forces, is compelling, especially by comparison with the Italian contexts that Wallace invokes. The phrase also speaks for a number of trenchant studies over the last two decades stressing the inconsistent or elided role of London and mercantilism in the period's literature.5 Indeed, a steady focus on the courtly centers of [End Page 66] patronage and initial readership for the London writers we call “Ricardian” has led to their fulfilling that label not only by period but also insofar as they addressed the higher nobility and the king.6 Yet whereas literary historians once followed the historians’ view that London merchants typically framed their cultural ideals and identity in imitation of those of the nobility, more recent historical studies have unraveled this assumption.7 Moreover, the basic reasons for literary attention to Maghfeld and his book should not be forgotten. Nearly forty of the figures mentioned in his book—far more than in any comparable courtly materials—are mentioned in Chaucer's life records, which Rickert was excavating from the then Public Record Office when she printed excerpts from Maghfeld's book (still almost the only portions in print). Manly used Rickert's results to suggest that Maghfeld was directly satirized in the portrait of Chaucer's Merchant. Such purposes tended to isolate Manly's and Rickert's inquiries both from postwar formalist and, later, wider historicist scholarship. Even Rickert, an immensely dedicated archivist, offered Maghfeld's text chiefly as a vehicle for revealing the minutiae of the “characters” of Chaucer's world. Concerning an entry where Maghfeld notes a loan given to mayor Adam Bamme to buy a hat in “silk of Tripoli,” Rickert wonders, “was the goldsmith who made cups for John of Gaunt to give Philippa Chaucer a...

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