There are three modern works on John of Gaunt that are indispensable for his biography and provide a myriad of circumstantial details on his life. These are Sydney Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt (London: Constable Press, 1904); P. E. Russell, The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and Richard II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955); and, above all, Anthony Goodman, John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth-Century Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).
Armitage-Smith wrote his biography as a young man. He eschewed the academic life and became a government official. His biography of Gaunt is still valuable for its narrative flow. Russell ended up in the chair of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of London. His later articles, partly summarizing his massive English Intervention and supplementing it, are in his Portugal, Spain, and the African Atlantic, 1343-1490: Chivalry and Crusade from John of Gaunt to Henry the Navigator and Beyond (Brookfield, Vermont: Variorum, 1995).
Goodman, who is a professor of medieval history at the University of Edinburgh, set out to write the definitive biography of John of Gaunt. The result is somewhat less than that, being a series of studies mainly on Gaunt’s political and military career but immensely valuable—British positivist scholarship at its best.
The second half of the fourteenth century, Gaunt’s lifetime, was an era marked by revival of the great school of monastic historiography that had flourished at St. Albans Abbey in the early twelfth century (William of Malmesbury) and the mid-thirteenth century (Matthew Paris). Of the four clerical historians of the late fourteenth century, Henry Knighton, Thomas Walsingham, John de Trokelowe, and the anonymous monk of St. Albans, all but Knighton, who was a cathedral canon, were associated with St. Albans. Thomas Walsingham was the historiographical leader and may have written a large part of the chronicle attributed to Trokelowe. Walsingham was very interested in classical literature and his literary studies affected the dramatic kind of exposition in his historical writings.
It is a current consensus that of contemporary chroniclers in Gaunt’s time, Thomas Walsingham is the best informed and most reliable. He compiled Historia Anglicana, 2 vols., ed. H. T. Riley (London: Rolls Series 1867-1868). But Walsingham is sharply inconsistent in his view of Gaunt—hostile at the start, more favorable as he goes along. This may simply be due to increased patronage the abbey received from Gaunt, but it may also be due to a reduction in Gaunt’s support for Wyclif.
Of a different order is V. H. Galbraith, ed., The Anonimalle Chronicle, 1333 to 1381 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1926), which provides eyewitness accounts of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and also of parliamentary debates in 1376. It was written by a London bureaucrat or possibly a merchant.
Along with the work of the chroniclers there are four volumes of Gaunt’s business, political, and military letters: John of Gaunt’s Register, 1372-1376, ed. Sydney Armitage-Smith, Camden 3rd series, vols. 20-21 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1911); John of Gaunt’s Register, 1379-1383, ed. Eleanor C. Lodge and R. Somerville, Camden 3rd series, vols. 56-57 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1937).
The most prolific historian writing in the Anglo-French world of the fourteenth century, Jean Froissart, Oeuvres, ed. K. de Letten-hove, 25 vols. (Brussels: V. Devaux, 1867-1877) has experienced fluctuations in his reputation over the past 125 years. Currently his reputation for accuracy is not very high. Froissart describes battles and events he did not witness. How assiduously he sought accurate knowledge from well-informed people is mysterious. His literary skill was high and he was very familiar with the royal and princely courts. In time, Froissart’s work will be seen as a complex effort of the chivalric imagination. Of modest value is Adam de Usk, Chronicon, ed. E. M. Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904).
In spite of the skepticism expressed by some scholars with regard to the closeness of the relationship between John of Gaunt and the poet, government official, and diplomat Geoffrey Chaucer, three facts cannot be contraverted. First, Gaunt supported Chaucer with a sizable pension for three decades and even provided a smaller pension for Chaucer’s wife, Philippa. Second, the paths of the Duke and the poet often crossed at the royal court for two decades. Third, Chaucer’s sister-in-law Catherine Swynford was Gaunt’s prime mistress, the mother of four of his children, and finally his third wife. One modern Chaucer biographer has suggested that Philippa Chaucer was also a ducal mistress.
Because of Gaunt’s patronage of Chaucer, biographies of Chaucer illuminate Gaunt’s life as well as Chaucer’s thought world as it impinged from a more middle-class point of view on Gaunt’s. The important works on Chaucer are Donald R. Howard, Chaucer, His Life, His Works, His World (New York: Dutton, 1987), a successful and imaginative effort at a full-scale biography written for the general reader; Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1992), suffused with deep Harvard learning; Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), full of brilliant insights; John H. Fisher, The Importance of Chaucer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), of which much the same may be said. George Williams, A New View of Chaucer (Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 1965), although it has not found favor with the academic establishment, is also worth reading.
The three works of Chaucer that are most relevant to John of Gaunt and his world are The Canterbury Tales, translated into modern English by Nevill Coghill (New York: Penguin, 1951, rev. ed., 1977); Book of the Duchess; and Troilus and Criseyde. Translations of the latter two works may be found in The Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, translated by J.S.P. Tatlock and Percy MacKay (New York: Macmillan, 1928).
It is to the aristocratic world of chivalry that Gaunt belongs. He was perhaps its finest exemplar. Johan Huizinga’s 1924 classic remains critically important: The Waning of the Middle Ages (reprint, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969); or The Autumn of the Middle Ages, translated by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammi-tych (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). But more recent books offer fine insights on Gaunt’s chivalric culture: Maurice H. Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); and Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Kaeuper’s book is an attempt at a general sociology of chivalry.
F.R.H. Du Boulay, An Age of Ambition (New York: Viking Press, 1970), offers many fine insights into English society around 1400. The most dramatic event of Gaunt’s lifetime, the Black Death of 1346-1349, is examined in all aspects in Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (New York: Free Press, 2001).
These are indispensable introductions to the political and social context in which Gaunt’s life occurred: Maurice H. Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, 1348-1500 (London: Penguin, 1990); Stephen H. Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status, and Gender (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Michael Prestwich, The Three Edwards (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1980); W. M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); John Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy, 1348-1530 (London: Macmillan, 1977); Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Clifford J. Rogers, ed., The Wars of Edward III: Sources and Interpretations (Rochester, New York: Boydell Press, 1999); Rodney H. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (New York: Viking Press, 1973); Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978); Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991-1999); Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Michael Bennett, Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1999), which connects Richard’s sexuality and politics in a persuasive manner; Anthony Goodman and James Gillespie, eds., Richard II: The Art of Kingship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Alexander Rose, Kings in the North: The House of Percy in British History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002); and John Gillingham, “From Civilitas to Civility: Codes of Manners in Medieval and Early Modern England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, vol. 12, 2002, pp. 267-290.
On social history there are two important pioneering works: Zvi Razi, Life, Marriage, and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society, and Demography in Halesowen, 1270-1400 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and Barbara H. Harvey, Living and Dying in the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). R. B. Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970) is a well-edited collection of translated material.
Two important works on economic history are Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain, 850-1520 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); and Bruce M. S. Campbell, English Seigneurial Agriculture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Gaunt’s activity as a feudal lord is treated in Simon Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity, 1361-1399 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). G. L. Harris, Cardinal Beaufort: A Study of the Lancastrian Ascendancy and Decline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) illuminates Gaunt’s family connections and what happened to them in the next generation.
On literary, intellectual, and religious history, two works originally published in 1933 remain important: G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (reprint, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966); and Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church (reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). In addition are three recent substantial works: Gordon Leff, Bradwardine and the Pelagians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957; 1984); Edward Grant, The Foundation of Modern Science in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Norman Kretzmann et al. eds., The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100-1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1996) is careful, learned, and insightful; Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th to 18th Centuries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991) is weird and verbose but interesting; Anne Hudson, ed., Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997) has an extremely valuable introduction and notes; Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman, eds., Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) is also useful, particularly the paper by Laura A. Smoller.
On late medieval English religion in general, see Susan Brig-den, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603 (New York: Viking, 2000), chapters 2 and 3; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c. 1500 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
The best book on Piers Plowman is William Langland’s Piers Plowman: The C Version: A Verse Translation, translated by George Economou (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). James Simpson, 1350-1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) contains many suggestive insights.
For Muslim and Jewish culture and society in Spain, Solomon D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983-1993) supersedes all previous books on the subject. Goitein’s Mediterranean Society was based on thirty years of archival research, and the significance of this mass of information has not yet been fully understood by medieval historians.
On Wyclif and the Lollards, who play a role tangential to Gaunt, Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) is the starting point for all future research on the subject. It is based on a thorough study of all available sources. Herbert B. Workman, John Wyclif: A Study of the English Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), while out-of-date in several respects, still contains important material. K. B. McFarlane, John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (London: English University Press, 1952) is a classic that places Wyclif in the context of Oxford academic politics. On Gaunt as patron and protector of Wyclif, Joseph H. Dahmus, The Prosecution of John Wyclif (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952) is valuable. Michael Wilks, Wyclif: Political Ideas and Practice, ed. Anne Hudson (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2000), is a work of major importance based on decades of research.
For the biographer of Gaunt, Gaunt’s relationships with Wyclif and Chaucer are important matters. Gaunt can be portrayed as the exemplar of aristocratic chivalry. But his appreciation for Chaucer’s writings, as indicated by his steadfast patronage of the poet, and his stalwart protection of Wyclif show other sides to this very complex and transitional figure.