Law and Disorder in Ludus Coventriae

Law and Disorder in Ludus Coventriae Lynn Squires My purpose is to provide a new context for the late medieval cycle of plays traditionally referred to as Ludus Coventriae by investigating the fifteenth-century legal conditions reflected in these plays. Critics of medieval drama have not recognized the importance of laws as a religious ideal and so have not noticed its significance in late medieval and early Renaissance religious drama. Because we no longer link law with religion, we must remind ourselves that law, for the medieval Englishman, was the formal expression of divine will; it was the common belief that the common as well as the ecclesiastical law originated in the mind of God. This did not prevent Englishmen from crit­ icizing their legal institutions, however; law was, in fact, an extremely controversial topic in the fifteenth century, no less so than in the sixteenth. Law stood for the principle of virtue itself; it stood for the ordering forces in societyl and, more importantly for our pur­ poses, in drama. When fifteenth-century lawyers, politicians and dramatists argued for legal reform, like John Wyclif before them, they were arguing for reform of their entire society. Although it was an age of reverence for law, in theory, and an age of prosperity and relatively good repute for the legal profession,2 it was also an age critical of its degenerate common law system and of its litigious citizens who overtaxed that system. The plays in Ludus Coventriae speak out against the people responsible for vexatious prosecutions in court and against the many legal abuses practiced in and out of court as well as against the in­ adequacy of the old legal system to curb lawlessness. In the words of the legal historian William Holdsworth, the law itself had become a “sword for the unscrupulous”: “The fo rms of law and physical violence had come to be merely alternative instruments to be used as seemed most expedient.”3 The forms of law are used, for example, in the Ludus Coventriae passion 200 Lynn Squires 201 sequence as a means of destroying Jesus. The plays in that sequence show how the crucifixion of Christ, far from being a travesty of justice, accurately reflects justice as Englishmen then knew it; in that sequence, the trial and punishment of Christ is carried out specifically within the jurisdiction and following the procedures of the fifteenth-century court of common law. In other words, Englishmen watched themselves try, condemn, and crucify Christ, and in this way they took responsibility them­ selves for his death. Not only did Christ die for them but also because of them— as a victim of their own courts of law. Thus the passion sequence— which I will discuss in some detail—leads its audience to a re-evaluation of the existing court system and of their own principles of justice. It can be argued that parallels between English and Judaic legal matters are due simply to the habit of anachronism or that, for example, contemporary clothing had to be used for costum­ ing because no one knew how a Jewish bishop or judge would have dressed during Jesus’ lifetime. The plays go so far beyond scriptural requirements, however, that it becomes necessary to attribute special meaning to contemporary characters, costumes, and incidents which serve non-scriptural purposes. For example, the Ludus Coventriae playwright uses the capture of Jesus to demonstrate the most familiar evil of the age: maintenance, and its attendant evils perjury, champerty, and conspiracy to defraud .4 The retrogression to feudal disorder in the fifteenth century is a historical commonplace; the cause of disorder is said most usually to be the indentured retinue or band of re­ tainers serving the often violent purposes of their sworn lords.5 In The Taking of Jesus, the adherents of the Old Law have gathered a fellowship and armed themselves with “Cressetys lantemys and torchys lyth/ And J>is nyth to be J>er redy/ With exys gleyvis and swerdys bryth” (27.663-65)6 in order to cap­ ture Christ. This represents a considerable embellishment and particularization of the capture as set forth in the Gospels: “Therfor whanne Judas hadde takun a...