Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and the Commercial Practices of Late Fourteenth-Century London by Craig Bertolet (review)

Craig Bertolet convincingly argues for the centrality of purchasing power and rising material and social capital in shaping the late medieval English national identity, creating London as a “gateway” into a “community constructed on commodity exchange” (5). Bertolet reads late fourteenth-century London as the epicenter of England’s emerging economic market, an economy which was transforming the “behavioral practices in London” by aligning “desire-based purchasing” with rising social capital. Bertolet interrogates commercial practices in literary texts as central to the formation of personality and national identity (4). Recent criticism has centered mainly on mercantilism and the creation of a merchant class within English society, Bertolet proposes a wider lens to look at not only “those who sell” but the entire industry which attended upon the seller (5). Bertolet sees the social and political atmosphere of the fourteenth century—with the convergence of the Black death, a weak monarch, and increasing trade from the Western Hanseatic league and Flemish—as allowing the trade market to assert a dominant role within society. Recognizing the importance of a rising mercantile middle class in English society is not entirely original, but Bertolet’s treatment in conjunction with contemporary law and social norms is very valuable for appreciating the economy’s wide reaching influence.

Bertolet builds an argument about the market as a particularly inclusive social space suitable for the formation of identity and reputation, incorporating Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” and “doxa” as codified human behavior from memory and communal history that then becomes ingrained and tacitly accepted. Thus the guild and the marketplace become central to economic prosperity, which in term becomes central to social and political success. The market takes on a central role in the English penal system, where a crime not only must be made public and punished publically, it becomes a crime against the mercantile community. Bertolet thus sees friendship and prosperity predicated on commercial networks, such as the guild and Aldermen courts, and conformity to them. Similarly, the culture shows an anxiety of “mesreule” of excessive spending, such as Hoccleve’s friendless character, suggesting that the “possession of money equals inclusion in the city,” while without the ability to buy and sell “a person has no identity in society” (6). These guilds therefore were both “protectionist and dictatorial,” controlling civic order in the place of Richard II relatively weak monarchy. The conjunction of the decreasing royal control and the increasing wealth and authority of the merchant guilds allowed wealth to become synonymous with the “highest good” which had formerly been reserved for the knightly class, thus “wealth derived from commerce could open access to the kingdom’s nobility” (9).

Bertolet extends his argument on the nation’s identity defined by commerce to assert that the literature of the period shows anxiety over the contamination of “social capital” with the merchant classes’ entry into the gentry’s “chivalric code of honor”(9). The poets seem to heighten this anxiety more than satisfy contemporary fears, frequently illustrating a disconnect between worthiness and wealth, which the mercantile society of London was attempting to construct. Bertolet intriguingly traces the etymology of “credit” as a term from the chivalric code of honor appropriated by the commercial market to become one’s financial honor, which turned “material capital” into “symbolic capital” and finally “social capital” or status (9). Thus even the language of London’s economic market expresses a desire for increased social standing.

Alternating political and commercial focus, Bertolet divides his analysis into an inquiry of commercial polities, markets, debts and credit, shopkeeping, and the hospitality trade. In chapter 1, Bertolet focuses on Gower’s Mirour de L’Omme, supported by Chaucer and Hoccleve, as a critique of London’s commercial polity. Reading all three poets as informing one another, Bertolet proposes their shared suspicion about commerce in the city. In conjunction with Marion Turner’s work on conflict, Bertolet perceives the widening space of commerce within the city—which...