The Historical Literature of the Jack Cade Rebellion (review)

This monograph is a literary analysis of the chronicles that narrate the popular revolt organized by Jack Cade and others in the summer of 1450. Alexander Kaufman suggests that literary critics have ignored the Cade Rebellion for its "association with fifteenth-century studies" (p. 195). Besides remedying this neglect, the study serves a wider historical purpose: with the exceptions of I. M. W. Harvey's Jack Cade's Rebellion of 1450 (1991) and the chapter in Ralph Griffith's Reign of King Henry VI (1981), even historians have been reluctant to treat the Rebellion as anything more than one of numerous symptoms of the popular discontent that culminates in Henry VI's deposition.

Kaufman's focus on chronicles is a methodological difference from Harvey's book, which relies heavily on judicial records. As such, the book contributes to the recent resurgence of interest in fifteenth-century chronicles, building especially on Mary-Rose McLaren's The London Chronicles of the Fifteenth Century (2002). Kaufman cites from twelve London chronicles (Robert Bale's Chronicle; The Great Chronicle of London; the New Chronicles of England and France; Gregory's Chronicle; A Short English Chronicle; Richard Arnold's Chronicle; Richard Hill's Chronicle; The Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London; A Short Chronicle of Events from John Vale's commonplace book; Bodleian MS Gough London 10; British Library MSS Cotton Julius B.i; and Cotton Vitellius A.xvi) and three others (the prose Brut, An English Chronicle 1377-1461 [Davies' Chronicle], John Benet's Chronicle). He omits at least six chronicles that are unedited, defending this omission on the grounds that their accounts are "similar" and "brief" (p. 11 n. 30). The ramifications of their apparent disinterest in the Rebellion are left unexplored. He restricts discussion of the Latin chronicles to a brief aside on alliteration (pp. 78-79).

Chapter 1 provides the theoretical basis of the book in its examination of the ideologies of the rebels and the motivations of the chroniclers. Kaufman cautiously suggests that Cade's rebels "should not be seen as a like-minded collection of people" but rather as "a heterogeneous collective that . . . possibly shared a unifying ideology, which was perhaps put forth by Cade himself" (p. 23). Having defined this ideology in terms of "five requests for the king" (p. 24)—and he here, as in the chronology supplied as an appendix (pp. 199-202), displays an indebtedness to Harvey's work—Kaufman examines each chronicle's interpretation. He suggests that while the rebels themselves had a unifying ideology, among the chronicles themselves "there does not exist an alpha ideology that drives the rhetoric" (p. 60). Kaufman discusses each chronicle in turn, examining the intentions of each author. The principal (and prominent) structuring theories are those of Eagleton and Derrida, with digressions on Barthes, Foucault, and Fish. The chapter efficiently covers a vast amount of material, and, while heavily dependent on Eagleton's work on ideology, evinces a sense of the conflicting views and heterogeneity of even London, pro-Yorkist chroniclers.

Chapters 2 and 5 are the core and most original parts of the book, discussing the literary and linguistic aspects and structures of the chronicles. They concern the literary language ("alliteration, organic metaphors, and metonymy," p. 61) and literary structure (emplotment and characterization) of the chronicles. Kaufman's argument, via a largely superfluous parenthesis on trauma theory and the Holocaust, is that literary techniques in chronicles "do not diminish the truthfulness of the historical record" but in fact create "a more realistic and authentic historical narrative" (p. 61). The identity of the "some scholars" (p. 63) who apparently oppose these familiar views is not revealed. Kaufman's discussion of alliterative technique is dependent on subjective views on the effects of sounds with which readers may disagree: "the hard 'c' heightens the brashness of the 'rabble'" (p. 76); "the abruptness of the two initial 'b's . . . in their close proximity to one another" signals "the prime nature of the event...