Versions of "Manliness" in the Poetry of Chaucer, Langland, and Hoccleve

The terms for manliness to be considered here, manhood, man, and manly, did not belong to the official moral discourse of medieval England, as displayed in the many sermons and treatises of the time. Rather, they represent judgments passed in common parlance, at a level of everyday usage for which the evidence is more scanty. In his book The Structure of Complex Words, William Empson was able to devote three whole chapters to a single such "rich and shifting term of praise," the word honest, drawing on the great range of post-medieval writings that display its various senses and implications.¹ Medieval sources allow no such fullness of treatment, but they are enough to exhibit some more modest complexity in their versions of "manliness," even where consideration is confined, as here, to some poems of the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

Since manly was a term not subject to the discipline of clerical definition, unlike words such as patient or charitable, its meanings are to be inferred from whatever in the broad general background of ideas about masculinity may seem to be called for in each particular context. Most prominent among these was the idea of male courage and prowess in battle.² When Troilus rides with his posse past Criseyde's house, Chaucer describes him thus:

God woot if he sat on his hors aright,Or goodly was biseyn, that ilke day!God woot wher he was lik a manly knyght!

(II, 1261-63)

As he passes, Troilus has saluted Criseyde with a modest grace, and the impression he creates is far from exclusively macho; but the phrase "manly knight" invests him with the glamor of a warrior, for in that collocation manly chiefly denotes courage or prowess. So, in the Knight's Tale, Theseus fought with Creon "and slough hym manly as a knyght" (I 987). Manhod often carries the same meaning. When Criseyde earlier saw Troilus riding back from battle, it was "his manhod and his pyne" that impressed her (II, 676); and, later in the same poem, Cassandra recalls how Meleager slew the monstrous boar "with his manhod" (V, 1476). The simple word man can also on occasion be sufficient, as when, in the Legend of Good Women, Phaedra assures her sister that Theseus will succeed in killing the Minotaur: "If that he be a man, he shal do so" (2002). Empson discusses some later "pregnant uses" of the word, citing Hamlet's praise of his father: "He was a man, take him for all in all,/I shall not look upon his like again."³

The word man has other pregnant meanings elsewhere. In Thomas Hoccleve's Male Regle, the poet describes how, in his profligate youth, Thames boatmen flattered him into taking expensive water-taxis home after work:

Me thoghte I was y-maad a man for euere:So tikelid me þat nyce reuerence,Þat it me made larger of despense.⁴

To be a "man" here is a status achieved by the free spending of money. Similarly, in the prologue to Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes, an old man recalls how, when he was young, friends used to encourage him in his "fool largesse":

"They me conforted ay in myn excesse,And seide I was a manly man withalle."⁵

The adjective manly, coupled here with man, carries the same sense, 'free-spending,' in a passage of Chaucer's Shipman's Tale describing a monk who ingratiates himself into the household of a merchant:⁶

Free was daun John, and manly of dispence,As in that hous, and ful of diligenceTo doon plesaunce, and also greet costage.

(VII 43-45)

There are ironies lurking in this use of manly that emerge only as the tale progresses: having established himself as a lavish tipper and all-round good fellow, the monk ends up using a generous loan from the merchant to buy the sexual favors of his wife.

Like Hoccleve, Chaucer evidently had his doubts about the uses to which this particular version of "manliness" could be put. But other forms...