AS I MAKE clear in the introduction, narrative has a specific prosthetic function for those speakers who use it both to claim debility and to use those claims to achieve authority and some measure of bodily and mental coherence. What is at stake is not primarily whether or not the disability is real— the question of whether old age brings impairment for many of those who reach old age is insurmountable and undeniable— but rather how this impairment both creates the occasion for narrative and how that narrative augments the aged, impaired body.

To that end, I turn to the alliterative poem Parlement of Thre Ages for its creation of a figure of old age, who debates within a dream space, occasioned by a hunter (or poacher) who falls asleep. This figure, who echoes then-contemporary depictions of allegorical Elde, debates Youthe and Medill Elde and narrates a tale of his body's physical weaknesses alongside a retelling of the Nine Worthies. While this poem has been the subject of many scholarly interventions, few have noticed how the poem links directly— and accidentally— to the first fitt of Wynnere and Wastoure, another debate poem which follows Parlement in one manuscript, British Library, MS Add. 31042, the so-called London Thornton manuscript, in their handling of connections between age and narrative. This similarity creates an almost prosthetic relationship between the end of Parlement and the beginning of Wynnere, serving as an additive for both poems. In order to illustrate not only the prosthetic relationship that exists between old age and narration, but also between the two poems, this chapter discusses the links created by the manuscript's owner and scribe briefly, before centring the rehearsal by this old speaker of the Nine Worthies and its ties to Wynnere and Wastoure's discussion of narrative and old and young speakers.