A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England by Richard Firth Green (review)

REVIEWS RICHARD FIRTH GREEN. A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricar­ dian England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Pp. xvi, 496. $62.50. Richard Firth Green has written a wildly learned and massive study, a kind ofmature superdissertation that will leave other scholars toiling in his wake. The reviewer's task is like that of the cartographers in the Borges story: the only accurate way to map such a book would be to reproduce it in full. For it is full ofdetail-wonderful detail-and the detail becomes the point, to the extent that Green has had the sense to let its proliferation overgrow the neater borders of the merely very ambitious book he first set out to write. Readers will encounter, and surely enjoy, Green's deep familiarity with legal record and handbook over four centuries, his use of literary and legal texts together, his com­ mand of historical semantics, intellectual history and theology, his ex­ cursions into anthropology and ethnography, even the Nigerian novels that put in frequent appearances of inspired eccentricity. It would be impossible not to profit from such a book, and dishonest not to register my first reactions as gratitude and pleasure. One of the pleasures is to watch Green's design grow visibly more complex. The original project, to which the title still testifies, is orderly: to take "truth," which Green calls "arguably the archetypal keyword in English" (p. 4), and investigate its several senses and shifts of meaning that crystallize, he says, in the fourteenth century. Green shows how the legal and ethical meanings of the word occur first, and only much later come the theological and intellectual senses. Playing through the shifts in meaning is the "dislocation caused by a powerful centralized author­ ity employing a highly literate bureaucracy to enforce a common law still profoundly local and oral in its structural assumptions" (p. 124), "the way in which an increasing willingness to trust writing generated a corresponding crisis of authority, both intellectual and political" (p. 123). While recognizing that the movement begins clearly in the reign of Henry II, Green still wants to claim the reign of Richard II-which does happen to have all these texts foregrounding "truth"-as marking the point of no return, the moment at which the bureaucratic prevails in English polity and culture. Green would therefore wish to postdate a shift from communal memory to written record that Michael Clanchy has ascribed to an earlier period. This is because Green himselfemerges as a powerful partisan and advocate of older ways of doing things, of local, oral traditions and subcultures against the brutality of a rootless 497 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER regime ofthe written: "Ifthe king's law might one day learn to frame workable solutions, in Chaucer's day it was plainly making the situation progressively worse" (p. 163). But ifthis is the core ofthe book, the need to document the argument itself ensures that the Ricardian period cannot altogether remain the focus (as Green cheerfully and candidly admits in his preface). The origi­ nal floorplan is much extended before the book properly starts, and the range ofdocumentation goes from late Anglo-Saxon well into the fif­ teenth century, with as much attention devoted to the first halfofthe fourteenth century as to the second. Chapter 2 documents "Trothplight" and chapter 3 "The Folklaw," close-reading a wealth of documentary evidence with depth and sensitivity. Already the reciprocal use ofliter­ ary and legal is paying extraordinary dividends. "Ordeals offered neither so daunting a challenge nor such unequivocal results as romance and ballad imply," writes Green (p. 107), while also demonstrating that lit­ erary play on equivocal oaths is no mere folkloric device but "a reflection ofactual judicial practice" (p. 115). The magnificent chapter 5, "Fol­ villes' Law," as well as discussing contemporary attitudes to lovedays from the thirteenth century on, opens with "The Outlaw's Song ofTrail­ baston" from Harley 2253, deals with marginalized outlaw bands in lit­ erature and life, and, by showing that a documentary mentality destroys "trouthe," swells into an examination ofthe Peasants' Revolt as carni­ valizing "antijudicial uproar" (p. 199). By this stage it would seem that Green...