Giving Each His Due: Langland, Gower, and the Question of Equity

In the Prologue to Piers Plowman, the short interaction between the angel and the goliard seems to present us with a conflict between the king's prerogative mercy and the rigor of the law. ¹ The angel argues that the king should clothe the naked law with mercy and the goliard retorts with the well-known etymological argument that the king gets his name from ruling well ("'rex' a 'regere' dicatur nomen habere"; l. 141) and can only rule well if he upholds the laws. This explication of lines 121–45 originates with a note by Cyril Brett in 1927. ² As proof that the contrast between justice and mercy was a pressing issue in the late fourteenth-century, Brett refers us to Book 7 of John Gower's Confessio Amantis. Gower too is interested in the question of sovereignty, whether the king, in the words of a popular legal maxim, is legibus solutus, or free from the law. It is this connection between Gower and Langland's notions of justice, or more specifically equity, that I will examine in what follows. Despite their ostensible ideological differences, Gower and Langland share a legal and political reference field that legal and political reference still needs further study, and that discloses some surprising similarities.

I. Defining Equity

Both poets use the term equity infrequently, but a sense of its importance, as well as its difficulty, is readily evident from a pair of examples. In Piers Plowman, the principal occurrence is undoubtedly Passus 19's description of the Spirit of Justice:

Spiritus Iusticie spareth noght to spille hem that ben gilty,And for to correcte the kyng if he falle in [any kynnes gilte]. For counteth he no kynges wrathe whan he in court sittethTo demen as a domesman—adrad was he nevereNeither of duc ne of deeth, that he ne dide the lawe;For present or for preiere or any prynces lettres,He dide equyte to alle eveneforth his power.

(19, 305–11)

What does it mean to "do equity?" Does "He dide equyte" stand in an appositive relationship to "he… dide the lawe," and if so, what does that mean? Is not equity the correction of the law? These are but some of the important questions this passage raises.

In the Confessio Amantis, the word equity creates similar interpretive difficulties. ³ Gower, like Langland, closely associates equity with justice, to the extent that Book 7's exposition of Pity seemingly contrasts equitable justice with pity and love:

It sit a king to be pitous…So that he worche no vengance,Which mai be cleped crualté.Justice which doth equitéIs dredfull, for he noman spareth;Bot in the lond wher Pité farethThe king mai nevere faile of love.

(7, 3125, 3128–33)

To paraphrase, the king should have pity so that he does not mete out punishments that might be considered cruel. ⁴ Equitable justice is frightening, for he spares no one, but the king who shows mercy is loved by his people. ⁵

It will be readily apparent that the two passages quoted do not fit easily with common ideas about the meaning of equity. For instance, Gower's opposition of equity and pity is at odds with scholarly usage of the term. Elizabeth Allen, for instance, defines Gowerian equity as the imaginative endeavor that qualifies justice and functions on the same level as pity and mercy. ⁶ Pamela Gradon, similarly, feels that Gower is influenced by the medieval maxim "Equity is justice tempered by the sweetness of mercy," a definition to which I will return. ⁷ In Book 7 it is equity itself that needs to be tempered and qualified. Gower's actual use of "equite" is thus more ambivalent than these definitions would suggest, and one of the aims of this article is to account for the discrepancy.

Langland's conception of equity has also received a great deal of critical scrutiny. Most famously, William Birnes, in his analysis of the Spiritus Iusticie passage, associates equity with Chancery jurisdiction, and comments, "the Court of Equity...