Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 by Steven Justice (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER The physical layout of the book is generally clear, but the graphic il­ lustrations of narrative forms often present the reader with a confusing visual image of dots and diagonal lines that adds nothing to the clarity of the prose descriptions of the texts. One might also suggest that books of the Bible could more easily have been referred to with common ab­ breviations (e.g., Matt., Ps.) rather than lengthy and sometimes in­ complete Latin phrases ("Secundum Matthaeum," p. 30; "Psalmi Iuxta Hebraicum," p. 119; both forms also appear in the index, p. 286). But these are minor matters in what is generally a competent account of the function of animal protagonists in the chief examples of animal poetry in medieval English literature. RICHARD NEWHAUSER Trinity University (San Antonio, Texas) STEVEN JUSTICE. Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381. The New Historicism Series, vol. 27. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994. Pp. xiv, 289. $40.00. StevenJustice has written an exciting, ruminating account of the ges­ tures of writing in the English Peasants' Rising in 1381. Where other historians and literary scholars have examined the causes and effects of the rebellion during that summer in 1381 or been concerned with the image of the rebellion in canonical literature,Justice wants "to under­ stand the thought of a rural revolt and of the rural communities that produced it; to trace what the English vernacular meant to those who spoke nothing else, and what writing meant to those who were not thought to read; to observe, from a starting angle, the development of vernacular literature, in the more usual and canonical sense of that word" (p. 4). Writing and Rebellion mostly dwells on the first goal, un­ derstanding the mentaliteof rural English communities in the late four­ teenth century by using not only the chronicle accounts of the Rising and the writings of Langland, Wyclif, Gower, and Chaucer but also work on the social history of fourteenth-century England.Justice argues that the Peasants' Rising was largely a struggle for literate and eco­ nomic power, which is to say class warfare by other means, although his 258 REVIEWS book also presents a more complex analysis of medieval class relations than the traditional schemes of lords, clergy, and lower laity or lord and tenant allow. Vernacular literacies became the means by which peasants and clerics used the idiom of reform in the writings of intellectuals such as Wyclif to challenge traditional clerical and aristocratic authority and dominance in the name of a better social, economic, and spiritual order. But Justice's book is not really an account of the "development of ver­ nacular literature." Writing and Rebellion treats the canonical poetry of Langland, Gower, and Chaucer mostly as skeptical or scornful responses to the vernacular literacy and rural ideology of the Rising or, in the case of the B-text of Piers Plowman, as unintentionally providing a vocabu­ lary and idiom for the rebels' discourse. Chapters 1 ("Insurgent Literacy") and 4 ("The Idiom of Rural Poli­ tics"), the core ofJustice's argument, make for compelling, provocative reading. These two chapters, describing in detail the historical and cul­ tural situation within which the famous six letters from John Ball and three laymen were composed, juxtapose the official royalist and clerical chronicle versions with an alternative representation from the perspec­ tive of the peasants and clergy who made the rebellion. Justice shows how peasants' functional literacy was motivated by economic concerns and documentary culture. Three more chapters ("Wyclifin the Rising," "Piers Plowman in the Rising," and "Insurgency Remembered") discuss the importance of Wyclif's writings and Langland's poem in shaping the idiom of the rebellion and the efforts of later Ricardian writers (Langland, Gower, and Chaucer) to dissociate themselves from the rebellion. The book opens with a brief narrative summary (pp. 1-4) of the events of the Rising. Beginning on May 30, 1381, peasants and some clergy attacked royal and local officials and grammar masters; plun­ dered abbeys; burned charters and other financial documents held by sheriffs and escheators; marched on London and executed Simon Sudbury, the king's chancellor and Archbishop of...