Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations and Citation Forms
- Introduction: Gower in History
- I Fourteenth-Century Panegyric Verse and Official Writing
- 1 Official Verse: The Sources and Problems of Evidence
- 2 The State Propaganda
- 3 Occasions of State and Propagandistic Verse in Mid-Century
- 4 Walter Peterborough's Victoria belli in Hispania (1367) and its Official Source
- 5 Compulsion in Richard Maidstone's Concordia (1392)
- II Gower's State-Official Late Poetry
- Bibliography
- Index
- VOLUMES ALREADY PUBLISHED
5 - Compulsion in Richard Maidstone's Concordia (1392)
from I - Fourteenth-Century Panegyric Verse and Official Writing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations and Citation Forms
- Introduction: Gower in History
- I Fourteenth-Century Panegyric Verse and Official Writing
- 1 Official Verse: The Sources and Problems of Evidence
- 2 The State Propaganda
- 3 Occasions of State and Propagandistic Verse in Mid-Century
- 4 Walter Peterborough's Victoria belli in Hispania (1367) and its Official Source
- 5 Compulsion in Richard Maidstone's Concordia (1392)
- II Gower's State-Official Late Poetry
- Bibliography
- Index
- VOLUMES ALREADY PUBLISHED
Summary
In a subsequent generation, still in Gower's adulthood, in circumstances of which Gower himself probably had better information than is now available, the same array of literary-historical actors may have converged in another substantive Latin verse performance. Perhaps: again, the evidence is not all that might be wished. There is still nothing, direct or indirect, about piecework payment nor official commission, though there is again indication of some relation between a poet and a possibly official commissioning agency; there is also clear official encomiastic purpose; and again some indication of possible reliance on official sources of information, originating from within the state, reaching a poet somehow.
In late 1392 a poem was produced under the headline-like polemical title Concordia facta inter regem et cives Londonie – about five hundred lines of unrhymed dactylic Latin verse – describing the city of London's pageantic submission to the authority of its king Richard II.
At the time, it may have appeared to be a fit of regal pique; but it was more likely part of a longer, more carefully wrought plan to raise funds for a monarchic state in straitened circumstance, as Caroline Barron showed: in May 1392, on account of the London citizenry's purported truculence, King Richard informed the civic officialdom of his intention to remove his Court of Common Pleas to York, and a general administrative removal took place. For the duration of 1392, in addition to the Common Bench, the Rolls of the King's Bench, the Exchequers of Accounts, of Pleas, and of Receipt, and the Chancery – the Fleet Prison, too, officers and inmates – all were removed from the metropolis.
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- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012