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Chapter 5. Inscription and Ceremony: The 1432 Royal Entry
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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c h a p t e r 5 Inscription and Ceremony: The 1432 Royal Entry On 21 February 1432, Londoners mounted a series of pageants to welcome Henry VI on his return to England after his Parisian coronation. The event was documented by John Carpenter, London’s common clerk, in a Latin letter that he subsequently entered into the city’s letter book. At some point soon after, Lydgate was commissioned to write a poem on the same event. That poem—in English, by a prestigious author, and with various rhetorical flourishes, including stanzas praising London—seems to have been requested to memorialize the occasion in a way that Carpenter’s Latin text was incapable of doing. Derek Pearsall has described Lydgate’s poem as a kind of souvenir program, and Maura Nolan has called it a transformation of spectacle into poetry, both of which are apt assessments that offer an interpretive context for a consideration of performance and inscription. The desire for a poetic representation of the 1432 pageantry and the turn to Lydgate as the person to undertake that literary effort reveals, among other things, an understanding of vernacular writing as a desirable adjunct to performance, as was emphasized when Lydgate’s poem was subsequently copied into the city chronicles that were ushering in a new form of vernacular writing. This chapter examines how vernacular writing intersects with ritual and ceremony in fifteenth-century England and considers the material form vernacular writing takes within public ceremonies as well as in the manuscript copies made to record those ceremonies. Inscription occurred in multiple places in and around the 1432 royal entry: in the processional route through the city followed by the king and his retinue, in the verses that were painted onto the pageants, in the accounts that reported the event, and in the manuscripts into 116 chapter 5 which those accounts were copied. We usually think of unscripted performances such as processions as fleeting and of written documents such as play-texts as fixed, yet the 1432 entry shows the falsity of that opposition and suggests how performance and inscription each contains and is shaped by “the possibility of the other.” By looking explicitly at acts of inscription within and around the performance that greeted the young king Henry, it is possible to trace how that “possibility of the other” influenced what spectators saw and readers later read. More specifically, in the 1432 entry, quotidian (and often ephemeral) writing—such as that found in the form of short texts, signs, bills, and nonverbal signs, including the heraldic arms and blazons of aristocracy or house or shop or tavern signs that have been called “a silent language of urban people”—intersected with what might be called durable writing intended to provide an official and permanent account suitable for memorializing an event within chronicles and civic records. The pageantry for Henry VI and its multiple inscriptions does not exactly pit the writing of the streets against the writing of official records but rather demonstrates how the two forms could compete and yet be dependent. Processional Inscription The 1432 pageants show an awareness of the tactics of ritual ceremony to craft a specific message about the city of London’s relations with Henry VI, and they inscribe that message spatially and temporally onto the city through the placement of pageantry and the movement of the king’s procession through the streets. After two years on the continent and having been crowned king of France, Henry VI landed at Dover and made his way to Blackheath where, on 21 February, he was met by the mayor, aldermen, and other Londoners and led past seven pageants that had been set up at various locations in the city. The pageants included a giant at London Bridge, flanked by two antelopes bearing the arms of England and France, with an inscription in Latin declaring that the giant would protect the king from foreign enemies; a tower erected in the middle of the bridge, featuring Nature, Grace, and Fortune along with maidens who presented the king with doves representing the gifts of the Holy Spirit; a tabernacle at Cornhill, with Dame Sapience and the seven sciences; at the conduit a child-king on a throne surrounded by Mercy, Truth, and Clemency; at the conduit in Cheapside, a well at which Mercy, Grace, and Pity offered wine and a paradise of fruit trees near which stood [3.229.124...