Troilus and Criseyde and the “Treasonous Aldermen” of 1382: Tales of the City in Late Fourteenth-Century London

Troilus and Criseyde and the ‘‘Treasonous Aldermen’’ of 1382 Tales of the City in Late Fourteenth-Century London Marion Turner King’s College London Troilus and criseyde is emphatically a product of the 1380s.1 It is a text informed by the discourses and politics of the time, deploying and manipulating the languages and concerns prevalent in late fourteenth -century London. Prominent among these concerns is an anxiety about betrayal and urban division, a concern that could easily be explored through the story of Troy—indeed, Christopher Baswell has recently discussed the fact that the Aeneid and the Peasants’ Revolt were compared by one late-medieval annotator.2 While scholars have drawn connections between Troilus and Criseyde and the Wonderful Parliament of 1386,3 little has been said about the implications of documents about the Peasants’ Revolt for the ‘‘textual environment’’ of Chaucer’s poem.4 1 Paul Strohm suggests that Chaucer may have worked on Troilus and Criseyde from late 1381 to late 1386, arguing that it was probably completed by late 1385. See Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 207, note 41. 2 Christopher Baswell, ‘‘Aeneas in 1381,’’ New Medieval Literatures 5, ed. Rita Copeland , David Lawton, and Wendy Scase (2002): 7–58. For the traditional connection between Troy and London see Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Sebastian Evans, rev. Charles W. Dunn (London: Dent, 1963). See also John Clark, ‘‘Trinovantum—the Evolution of a Legend,’’ Journal of Medieval History 7 (1981): 135–51; Francis Ingledew, ‘‘The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae,’’ Speculum 69 (1994): 665–704, and Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 3 See, for example, Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 158. 4 For the concept of the ‘‘textual environment,’’ see Paul Strohm, ‘‘The Textual Environment of Chaucer’s ‘Lak of Stedfastnesse,’’’ in Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 57–74, p. 57. 225 ................. 10286$ $CH7 11-01-10 13:54:11 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER In order to maintain a ‘‘respect’’ for the text, it is necessary to historicize it by placing it within the cultural context of contemporary discourses.5 J. G. A. Pocock writes that ‘‘languages are the matrices within which texts as events occur,’’ adding that texts ‘‘are actions performed in language contexts that make them possible, that condition and constrain them but that they also modify.’’6 This useful formulation emphasizes the fact that the text is both produced by and produces its world. The existence of urban dissent and division is by no means unique to the period in question, but the way in which such fragmentation is manifested and represented is a product of a specific historical moment. Troilus and Criseyde can profitably be read alongside a coeval set of texts, also produced in 1380s London, and also dealing with issues of urban tension and betrayal. These texts accuse certain London aldermen (John Horn, Walter Sibyl, and Adam Carlisle) of betraying the city during the Peasants ’ Revolt by opening the gates of the capital to the rebels (accusations that were almost certainly without foundation and politically motivated ).7 Both the accusations of the aldermen and Troilus and Criseyde serve to illustrate the changing allegiances and betrayals that dominated London politics in the 1380s.8 Reading these texts side by side allows us to situate Troilus and Criseyde within contemporary discourses of treason and urban fragmentation, discourses that were under particular pressure in the closing decades of the fourteenth century.9 In this article, I am 5 Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. xiii. 6 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘‘Texts as Events: Reflections on the History of Political Thought,’’ in Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 21–34, pp. 28–29. 7 John Fresh, a mercer, and William Tonge...