Only recently has Lydgate begun to be thought of as a London writer, as scholars have acknowledged the time he spent in the city, the connections he had with its residents, and the number of texts he wrote for or about it, including four mummings and disguisings apparently intended for performance in the city.1 According to John Shirley, the Mumming for the Mercers was performed on Twelfth Night (i.e., 6 January), to entertain William Estfeld, mayor of London, who was a member of the Mercers’ Company. In it, a presenter disguised as a herald from Jupiter recounts a journey across Africa and Europe to the Thames, then ushers into the hall three ships from which mummers dressed as oriental merchants bearing gifts of silk descend to greet the mayor. The Mumming for the Goldsmiths was performed on Candlemas Eve (i.e., 2 February), Shirley also says, once again for the mayor. It features Fortune, who brings a letter with news that David and the twelve tribes of Israel have come with the Ark of the Covenant to visit the mayor and present gifts. Estfeld was mayor of London in 1429–30 and 1437–38, but the latter can be ruled out as the date of the performance of these two mummings given that Trinity MS R.3.20 was composed in 1430–32.2 The Mumming at Bishopswood was written for May Day for London’s sheriffs, Shirley claims, possibly in the same year, although he gives no date; it introduces Flora, who ushers in springtime to drive away winter’s discords. The date and occasion of the Disguising at London are unknown, but its theme of good governance, which is seen as a remedy for Fortune’s dangerous instability, would have been well suited for the opening of parliament, as suggested by Shirley’s remark that it was performed “afore the gret estates of the lond,” in the long Christmas season of any year at the end of the 1420s or beginning of the 1430s.3
During Lydgate’s career—as in the century before, as well as that following—writing in English was a complicated sociopolitical activity that touched on questions of national and cultural identity, across status and gender divisions. Those questions, as Nicholas Watson observes, were mirrored “in every feature of the vernacular literature of the period, including a writer’s choice of genre, length, vocabulary, syntax, and poetic or prose style.” By the 1420s, relations among the trilingual literary cultures of England had shifted as texts written in English appeared in increasing numbers and as “a new sense of their importance” gave Middle English for the first time a status “closer to that of French or Latin.”4
Interest in that shift has made vernacular politics an important topic of scholarly investigation in recent years, particularly in analyses of the Lancastrian turn to English as a national language and the marketing of Chaucer as a key figure in attempts to make English a prestige language. In the second half of the fourteenth century, English began to be taught in schools, became the official language of the courts and parliament, spread dissent through Wycliffite treatises and bibles, was championed by Henry IV and Henry V for political purposes, and spawned a large body of literary works. In these historical processes, Lydgate’s position is one of cultivated dependence on Chaucer as “a poet worth citing and imitating,” as Watson observes, a dependence that signals “the arrival of English as a vernacular of a value comparable to that of French or Italian.5 Lydgate was, in the memorable phrasing of Larry Scanlon and James Simpson, “Chaucer’s first great impresario and competitor,” both relying on and battling a Chaucerian poetics. As a skilled user of the vernacular to suit Lancastrian and other—sometimes oppositional, or at least not fully equivalent with—interests, Lydgate moved beyond a Chaucerian poetics in various ways, including the creation of an ornate style intended to signal an orthodox form of writing in the native tongue as distinct from the heterodox threat posed by the Lollard use of English.6
Lydgate’s mummings and disguising for mayor, sheriffs, and parliament complicate this view in two ways: they use English—and, more specifically, specific genres of written English—in live performances, and they use the vernacular not as propaganda for court or church but to create a specific image of London. Making an argument against too easy slippage of the “idea” of the vernacular to the “ideal” and hence a valorization of vernacularity as the triumph of democratic freedoms over the oppressions of Latin and French, Sarah Stanbury notes that a vernacular language “exists only in relation to that which is standard, official, monological, or even imperial.” While Stanbury’s claim is part of her cautionary reading against assigning Middle English “heroic stature,” it stands as a useful reminder of the competition of languages, including multiple forms of the vernacular, that is part of the historical process of language change.7 It is within this context of linguistic competition and growing prominence of English that we can place Lydgate’s stylistic habits, such as his importing of Latin nouns and adjectives into Middle English, chiefly from liturgical or Vulgate Latin, to create what John Norton-Smith has described as the “word or phrase ‘calques’ ” that are such a notable feature of Lydgate’s verses, including the mummings and disguising he made for Londoners.8
Issues of genre and place are one of the first things that have to be reckoned with when considering the style and impact of Lydgate’s mummings and disguising for Londoners. Genres (or media) are at the center of Maura Nolan’s forceful analysis of the historical and literary situatedness of what she describes as Lydgate’s “public” works, a group that includes the Serpent of Division, several of his mummings, the disguisings at Hertford and London, and the verses associated with Henry VI’s 1432 entry into London. Nolan’s analysis of these texts hinges on the claim that in them Lydgate translated “the poetic and literary techniques he had learned from Chaucer into new media, especially spectacle,” thereby “remaking the forms of public culture available to him.” In transferring poetry to the realm of performance, Lydgate “creates uniquely hybrid texts, part reassuring moralisms or praise, part literary works in search of educated and savvy readers.” These texts are “public,” in Nolan’s view, both because they were designed to commemorate public occasions and because they constructed and spoke to an imaginary public; whether performed or not, these texts are conscious of their public status, and they imagine their audience as a public rather than an inchoate group. But unlike the “public poetry” of the late fourteenth century described by Anne Middleton, which was based on notions of “common profit,” Lydgate in Nolan’s view attempts to assert the sovereignty of the king, creating a shift from the Chaucerian sense of social whole as diverse and inclusive to a notion of it as hierarchical and exclusive.9
While the reading of Lydgate’s mummings and disguisings for Londoners that follows in this chapter intersects with Nolan’s understanding of the cultural work of those texts, it also diverges in a number of ways, especially in relation to place. The specifically London—and even more localized (e.g., in a guildhall)—location of the performances this chapter takes up is, I hope to show, central to their design and achievement, as is their later location in specific manuscripts, from which they reached an audience beyond their original spectators. Through the workings of what might be called vernacular cosmopolitanism—that is, the creation of an English poetics that relies on borrowings and assimilations—Lydgate’s London performances help imagine a particular version of the city. Lydgate may have channeled “the official, public voice of London,” in C. David Benson’s words, but he also found ways to deny that official voice, in works such as these that show London less as it is than “as it ought to be.”10
Unlike the biblical cycle plays from York and other provincial cities, Lydgate’s London mummings and disguising were performed not in the streets but within the relative privacy of halls and households. While less obviously public than many other civic performances, their in-house performance venues make them no less crucial in shaping opinion, working out cultural conflicts, and apportioning power, in this case, with an urban and mercantile rather than royal inflection, as a close reading of the texts and their audiences shows. That effect can be seen on both their primary audiences (those who commissioned and watched the performances) and their secondary audiences (those who read Lydgate’s verses for the performances when they circulated in manuscripts).11
Most likely performed at the height of nationalist fervor in the midst of the English-French military campaigns of the late 1420s, as the young Henry VI was being crowned king of England and France, these four mummings offer an image of London as cosmopolis, its prestige enhanced by the gloss of poetry, poetry in the native tongue. The mummings for the Mercers and Goldsmiths rework the threat of invasion as invited visit, thus refashioning enemies into guests. They similarly reimagine the problem of alien merchants and tradesmen, which for much of the fifteenth century was a pressing concern for London guilds, by turning unwelcome competitors into beneficent gift givers and supporters, not underminers, of the mayor’s authority, supporters whose fealty is secured through vernacular eloquence. The mumming that took place at Bishopswood and the disguising for parliament accomplish some of the same integrative work as they draw various groups of officials together, aligning sheriffs, who were agents of the king, not the city, with the interests of the civic government and making the concerns of a nationally focused Parliament mesh with those of the city.
In contrast with Chaucer, whose inability or unwillingness to represent London has been noted by scholars, Lydgate provides a clear image of the city in his verses for these groups.12 In these four entertainments, Lydgate achieves a literary merging of native and foreign, urban and courtly, civic and national relations within a city that was polyglot, ethnically diverse, socially divisive, and economically competitive. By inscribing foreign merchants and representatives of king and country into the space of London trading relations, even if only temporarily and under the guise of holiday gift giving and entertainment; by stressing the power of English poetry; and by emphasizing the importance of good governance, these performances bring together various fractured publics, shaping them into what Benedict Anderson has taught us to think of as an imagined community, a cultural artifact created and kept alive by specific historical forces.13
Recent literary scholarship has tended to characterize late medieval London as a place of diversity and multiplicity, with blurred boundaries between fragmented groups and oriented toward conflict.14 Statistics gathered by historians suggest that in the early fifteenth century, London was a cosmopolitan city whose 50,000 or so residents were linguistically and ethnically varied.15 Unique among English cities, London recruited its residents from every region of England as it expanded its population each year. To give a sense of the numbers involved, in the years from 1404 to 1442, some 578 apprentices were admitted to the Goldsmiths’ Company, an average of seventeen per year. Where they came from is not known, but of the fourteen admitted in 1407, the only year in which full details are given, only one was from London; the rest were from other parts of the country.16 In addition to the constant influx of new residents from the surrounding countryside and farther afield in England, individuals and even communities from various countries on the continent also lived in the city or its suburbs, especially in Westminster and Southwark. Colonies of foreign merchants had long been established in London, at least from the early fourteenth century on. Most of them came from the Low Countries, the Rhineland, and the ports of the Baltic coast, with a few from central Germany and France, as well as Italy, Spain, and Greece.17 Lombard Street had an Italian community of long standing, and the Hanseatic merchants even had a guildhall in London in Thames Street next to the Steelyard allotted the merchants of Cologne. Some of these foreigners, like the Hansards, had well-established rights and immunities—including the right to hold property and sell retail—while others depended more tenuously on royal or civic tolerance and made easy scapegoats when times turned bad.18
This diversity did not preclude segmentation among London’s various residents, especially as they were variously slotted into the broad categories of citizens, foreigners, and aliens. The term foreigners was used for the English-born unenfranchised, that is, those who were not “citizens” but had sworn loyalty to the city government and promised to bear their share of taxation and civic duty; local birth was no assurance of citizenship since even people native to London might be called foreigners if they were not enfranchised. Those born oversees were referred to as “aliens” or sometimes “strangers” or “Dutchmen.” Citizenship had distinct advantages, as well as a few liabilities. Only citizens were legally entitled to buy in the city with the intent to resell and to keep shops for the purpose of retailing merchandise.19 Thus, to citizens alone went the full rights and privileges of enfranchisement. But citizens also bore the burden of taxation and were subject to trade regulations and various civic responsibilities that noncitizens could escape.
Given the perception of their unfair edge over citizens, by virtue of this ability to evade regulations, aliens were not always welcomed into the city and could be frequent targets at moments of social, economic, religious, or political discontent, as the Flemish merchants murdered in the riots of 1381 attest.20 Steven Justice has argued that it was not just the economic success of Flemings in London that led to their murder but also their difference, especially their linguistic difference, which made them seem to be “figures of domination distinguished by a language the English artisan or rural worker could not understand.” As Justice also points out, the rebellion has a direct relationship to dramatic performance, given its occurrence just after the annual feast of Corpus Christi, a ceremony of communal identity, which “has some claim to be thought not only the occasion of the rising, but also a source of its public idiom.”21
Jews offer the best-known example of a xenophobia in which ethnic and religious outsiders were purged from England, but other groups, while allowed temporary residence within the country, were also on occasion vilified and physically attacked as well. Sylvia Thrupp’s assessment that parliament had been an “outlet for xenophobia” for years, with group after group being expelled, is borne out by the evidence of repeated expulsions from 1345 onward.22 Particularly as English nationalism grew in the fifteenth century, foreigners faced increased antagonism. In a flare-up of sentiments against foreigners in 1406, for instance, parliament ordered many aliens to leave England; seven were goldsmiths in London who paid the exchequer for the right to stay.23 The insular hostility expressed in the Libelle of English Polycye of 1436 and in various protectionist trade and sumptuary statutes was echoed in the riots of 1456 and 1457 against the presence of aliens in London, especially Italian and Lombard merchants.24 Closer to the time when Lydgate’s mummings were being performed, in a widely reported incident in 1429, a Breton servant and alleged spy, who had been accused of murdering a widow, was being escorted into exile by parish constables when he was overtaken by a crowd of women who snatched him away and stoned him to death; presumably his nationality was part of what incited this episode of women’s justice.25 This antipathy toward outsiders was mirrored in the London guild system, which tended to exclude aliens, as well as “foreigners” from the countryside, in most cases forbidding them to be enrolled as apprentices or to set up shop.26
Despite these attempts at exclusion, the economic advantages of working and trading in London were such that aliens persisted in finding ways of infiltrating the city’s commercial system; as a result, for most of the fifteenth century, London’s companies grappled with the problem of alien merchants who openly or covertly sought work in the city or its suburbs. Guild records reveal an oscillation between tolerance and hostility toward aliens, with an increasing hardening of attitudes against the presence of alien merchants by mid-century. The Goldsmiths’ accounts from the 1420s and 1430s, for example, authorized wardens and officers to conduct searches to hunt down alien goldsmiths, especially in Foster Lane and Lombard Street, which housed most of the craft; the wardens seem also to have searched Southwark—a favorite locale of alien goldsmiths—for “false boys” (i.e., foreign or alien apprentices) or “untrue workers,” often pursuing their quarry with vigor, to judge by the fines levied. In 1424, for instance, ten “Dutchmen” were fined for “misworking,” and in 1434, the “Ordinance of Dutchmen” forbade the employment of aliens.27 This rhetoric of truth and falsehood, of right and wrong persons and labor, deserves fuller analysis, but for the purposes of my argument here, it is perhaps sufficient to note that one of its effects is to bring to the question of national identity the value-laden language of moral imperative: to be an alien is to be false or wrong.
No matter the results of these attempts to root aliens out, or—more accurately, given that they were more often fined than expelled—to make them less of a competitive threat to citizens, many aliens found admission to London’s guilds. To cite just two examples, in 1428, the alien goldsmith John Coster paid ten marks for a license to work in his chamber for life and swore to keep the craft’s secrets, and in 1434, a Parisian goldsmith named Raymond Wachter paid twenty marks for a license to work with his four servants and later that year paid forty pounds to be admitted as a freeman of the Goldsmiths’ Company.28 The statute of 1477–78 reiterated that alien and stranger goldsmiths within the city and within two miles outside were to be subject to the wardens of the Goldsmiths’ Company; at first, the company granted these aliens licenses to work, and most were established around Lombard Street, removed from the center of goldsmith activity at the west end of Cheapside, although many were settling in Southwark and Westminster beyond the city limits.29 There were apparently enough alien goldsmiths living in London that they had a fraternity of St. Eloi, named after the goldsmith who in the seventh century became bishop of Noyon and was adopted as the patron saint of goldsmiths in many European countries. The extent to which aliens had infiltrated guilds is suggested by records for the Goldsmiths’ Company indicating that in 1444, the total full plus pensioned members were approximately 140, which probably included proportions similar to those in 1477 when the members included fifty-seven wardens, assistants, and liveried members; sixty-two young men; nineteen pensioners; and twenty-three aliens living in the city and eighteen in Westminster and Southwark. Indeed, some aliens seem to have spent their entire adult lives under the aegis of the guilds, such as the “Dutchman” Gerard Haverbeke, who had paid for full membership in the Goldsmiths’ Company and, on his retirement in 1476, was granted 1s. 2d. per week for the rest of his life.30 Lydgate himself describes assimilated aliens in his account of the 1432 welcome of Henry VI into London, in which richly attired “Esterlinges” rode in procession in a privileged position behind the mayor.31
Whatever degree of success individual aliens had in becoming members of London’s companies—usually by buying their admittance—nativist animosities lingered. Part of the hostility toward alien practitioners of the crafts had to do with the desire to maintain standards, to regulate prices, and to lessen competition. But another part arose out of nativist biases against outsiders. These attitudes are crystallized in a wager that took place at the Pope’s Head Tavern in Cornhill in 1466. The wager involved a test of skill between one Oliver Davy, a citizen and goldsmith of London, and a Spanish goldsmith of the same city and was designed to ascertain whether native or foreign goldsmiths were more adept at their craft, based on how well each man worked a small gold cup. Perhaps not surprisingly, the wager was judged in favor of the English goldsmith, stamping English craftsmanship as superior to that of strangers.32
London was porous in other ways as well, including the spatial and the political. Although often self-identified with the area within its walls, the city sprawled beyond those limits into suburbs and the surrounding countryside, into areas such as Southwark and Westminster. Bishops Wood lay outside London proper, in the parish of Stebunheath (present-day Stepney) near Bethnal Green. As the name suggests, these lands belonged to the bishop of London and thus were not under the control of the city, although Caroline Barron notes that Londoners claimed their principal hunting rights on the bishop’s lands.33 London was the seat of national government and the “king’s chamber,” as Lydgate styled it in his verses commemorating Henry VI’s royal entry in 1432, and its civic affairs overlapped with royal and national interests. Westminster, where the Disguising at London would have been performed if written for the opening of parliament, was also outside the city and, as the royal capital, was a courtly, not civic, domain, with its own economy and identity.34 Yet, Westminster was linked to London by proximity, trade, and ceremony, including such enactments as royal entries that ended at Westminster after traversing London and ridings to Westminster to obtain the king’s approval of mayoral elections, both of which used their processional routes to create a symbolic link between city and crown. Parliament drew men from the various regions of England to London, outsiders who nonetheless had connections in the city if only by virtue of their residence in town during parliamentary sessions. The city itself was often involved in affairs of parliament, as it sought to represent its own interests. The king’s presence at parliament, along with members of the royal court, nonetheless made visible the city’s subordinate position in relation to the central government. On a smaller scale, sheriffs did the same, since they were technically agents of the king, charged with keeping order in his name. Fines levied by them went to the king’s, not the city’s, coffers, and their first loyalty was to the crown, not the city. Nevertheless, because they were important officials, sheriffs were inevitably linked to the civic government, as Stow suggests when he claims that not just bishops but aldermen and other commoners were in attendance at the May Day festivities of which the Mumming at Bishopswood was part.35 In this and other ways, whatever its insistence on its own prerogatives and rights, London tended toward an openness and inclusivity that allowed it to absorb, at least temporarily, a wide range of people whose interests may not have entirely meshed with those of the city’s government or the citizens that government at least nominally represented.
Lydgate’s entertainments for the Mercers and Goldsmiths can be seen as festive interventions into this complex set of relations between London and the continent. In both performances, alien merchants are freely admitted into the fellowship, in the guise of Jewish or Eastern merchants who sail from afar to the port of London. Antiforeigner sentiments, which animated the polemics of the late 1420s, are submerged in these performances under a glowing patina of openness, amiability, and generosity—virtues in short supply on the streets of London outside the Mercers’ and Goldsmiths’ halls. But if in these mummings foreign merchants are welcomed into London’s guilds, they are at the same time placed in a clearly subordinate position of submission, as gift bearers come to pay tribute to the mayor, the crowning symbol of London’s civic might.36 What underscores civic power is the mummings’ emphasis on the literary; Lydgate’s verses not only present an example of the poetic arts but also serve to instruct Londoners in a literary aesthetics grounded in a specific use of written English. In so doing, the mummings create a vision of cosmopolitan vernacularity in which foreign culture is made native.
The occasion of the Mumming for the Mercers, as well as its content and performative features, plays into that vision. The liturgy associated with the Feast of the Epiphany, for which Shirley claims the mumming was performed, commemorated Christ’s birth and baptism as well as the visit of the Magi, muted echoes of which can be found in the mumming. The 105 lines that Lydgate wrote apparently to assist the Mercers in entertaining the newly elected mayor, who was himself a mercer, take the form of a long introductory speech that was probably spoken by a presenter (a “poursuyaunt”) and seems designed to usher into the hall three ships, possibly carrying mummers disguised as merchants from the Far East. As Glynne Wickham notes, Lydgate allegorizes this visual spectacle by combining the idea of the Magi with the miraculous draught of fishes to enhance the presentation of gifts to Estfeld.37 The text is a kind of geographic, mythological, and literary grand tour that describes how Jupiter’s messenger travels from the Euphrates to the Thames, passing various mythic sites, including those important for the origins of poetry, and encountering along the way three ships with slogans on their sides. The messenger finally reaches London, coming ashore where the Mercers have gathered to honor the mayor. The actual performance, which probably followed the reading aloud of the letter and which the running titles in the manuscript in which it survives refer to as a disguising, seems to have been as elaborate as Shirley’s comment that it was “ordeyned ryallych” (i.e., royally arranged) suggests: the verses imply that three pageant ships, costumed actors, music, dancing, action in which the ships cast their nets, and gift giving were part of the entertainment.
As first in precedence among London’s companies, with many members becoming mayor or sheriff, the Mercers possessed the means for a mumming as elaborate as this one. By the fifteenth century, the mercers had a hall, a chapel, and at least one other room (as well as a chest for keeping records) in the church of St. Thomas of Acre in Cheapside, near the birthplace of Thomas à Becket in an area once occupied by prosperous Jews.38 While their hall would have been suitable for feasts and entertainments, the mumming Lydgate wrote may have been performed in the mayor’s own hall, as the last stanza implies in mentioning that the mummers have come to visit the mayor and await his permission to enter. Estfeld was an especially illustrious mercer, serving as alderman, sheriff, mayor, and member of parliament for the city. He built the conduits at Aldermanbury and at the Standard in Fleet and was a benefactor of St. Mary Aldermanbury, where he was buried.39 In November 1429, he attended the coronation of Henry VI and received the gold cup used in the coronation ceremony, which he kept until his death in 1445.40 He appears to have been knighted in the 1430s.41 While an exceptional figure, Estfeld suggests the wealth and standing mercers could attain and the resources they could command for entertainments. Unfortunately, although the mercers’ accounts show payments toward royal mummings in the 1390s and in 1400–1401 and although the mercers seem to have had an interest in the short-lived London puy, as records from 1304 show, there is no extant account of this performance beyond the verses Shirley copied.42
The mumming makes reference to contemporary events, perhaps including commercial transactions involving Mayor Estfeld, but it more broadly functions as a form of cultural capital.43 With its extensive classical allusions, its conceit of Jupiter’s herald being sent as an envoy to the mayor, and its mixing of real and mythic geographies, the mumming constructs an image of London as the center of the trading universe—the mercantile hub of the commercial world. Its fifteen stanzas sketch an expansive geographic panopticon, beginning with the Euphrates and Jerusalem, then moving over Libya, Ethiopia, India, and on to Egypt, the Red Sea, Morocco, Spain, Calais, the Thames, and finally “Londones tovne” (l. 95), where the herald lands. Along the way, the herald sees three ships, each with lettering on its side. The first ship, from which a man fishes but brings up empty nets, has on one side the words “grande travayle” and on the other “nulle avayle” (ll. 62–63), underscoring the fisherman’s fruitless labor. The second ship, which the herald encounters as it is unloading, has a cabin gaily painted with flowers and a slogan in French stressing the need to be thankful for whatever fortune brings. The third ship, the one closest to London’s port, holds another fisherman, but this time one whose nets overflow with so many fish that “he nyst what til do” (l. 88). On the side of this ship, the mottos “grande peyne” and “grande gayne” (ll. 90–91) are painted—a pointed inversion of the first ship’s testimony to profitless toil. This progression from dearth to prosperity as the herald nears London emphasizes the city’s wealth, which radiates out to those near it, and sets the stage for the final set of ships the herald encounters, which are anchored on the Thames (“Hem to refresshe and to taken ayr,” l. 100) and from which men, possibly paid performers or members of the Mercers’ Company, descended to visit “the noble Mayr” (l. 102), bringing gifts of silk, one of the commodities in which mercers traded.44
In its structure, this mumming is not unlike the mumming for Richard II in 1377, when London’s civic authorities rode to the palace of Kennington at night disguised as a pope, emperor, cardinals, and African or Eastern ambassadors. When they arrived, they dismounted and carried three gifts for the king into the hall—a bowl, a cup, and a ring of gold—with several smaller gifts for the queen mother and other family members. After dancing, the mummers played a dice game with loaded dice to be sure Richard would win the gifts.45 In both the Kennington and Mercers’ mummings, the performance functions as a reminder of the mutual obligations of ruler and ruled, with the mummers’ gifts not only honoring the mayor or king but also underscoring his responsibility to his subjects. The giving and receiving of the gifts, including the gift of the performance itself, enacts a reciprocal relationship premised on loyal service on the part of the subordinates and beneficent paternalism on the part of the ruler. Such gift giving was well suited to the Feast of the Epiphany, when the Magi presented gifts to the infant Jesus as a sign of obeisance and humility. Epiphany was the inspiration for a number of dramatic performances, but none as far removed from liturgical sources as Lydgate’s mumming. The Christian typography underlies the Mumming for the Mercers but, in Lydgate’s hands, is turned into a thoroughly civic, urban spectacle. As Lydgate shows, the liturgical message of Epiphany could be readily appropriated within the context of a guildhall performance to reaffirm structures of authority and patterns of obligation linking mayor and merchants.46
As a letter in the form of a ballade, Lydgate’s mumming for the Mercers brings together two registers of vernacular writing. The writing of letters in English was becoming increasingly common by the fifteenth century and would have been especially familiar to an urban audience dependent on work-related correspondence.47 Letter writing had its own rhetorical techniques, in the form of the ars dictaminis, which guided persuasive epistolary writing. Although dictamen would have been familiar to Lydgate, it may have been less so to Shirley and to the mercers and their mayor, except indirectly through its influence on imaginative writing in Middle English.48 Like other loose-sheet writing, the letter was usually bureaucratic in nature or related to business, and Shirley’s description of Lydgate’s verses as taking that form invokes a similar utilitarianism.49 Strictly defined, a ballade was a three-stanza poem with refrain, a favorite French poetic form derived from dance music that never achieved wide popularity in Middle English. Shirley uses the term less precisely, here and elsewhere, to designate poems of rhyme-royal stanzas.50 In describing what Lydgate produced for the mercers as simultaneously letter and ballade, Shirley may be taking pains to note the formal features of what Lydgate wrote as well as how it was conveyed to the mercers and mayor, even as he also blends familiarly pragmatic—familiar both to himself through his work as Beauchamp’s secretary and to the mercers as tradesmen dependent on the exchange of information through letters—and lesser-known poetic forms of the vernacular.51 Shirley’s efforts conform to what Emily Steiner has described as the “documentary poetics” that characterized English writing in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, as poets such as Chaucer and Hoccleve drew on documentary culture “as a means of articulating the strategies and ambitions of their own literary making.”52
Lydgate may be less indebted to documentary culture than many of his predecessors were, but it nonetheless informs his performance pieces in various ways, including the use of letters and bills in his mummings and disguisings, as I will discuss more fully in this and later chapters. It is important to note, however, that in the Mumming for the Mercers and elsewhere, Lydgate draws not just from the worlds of poetry and prose but also from drama, specifically the liturgical dramas that since the twelfth century had been composed for and performed on the same feasts for which Lydgate was now writing performance pieces for Londoners. Part of the process of domesticating poetry that Lydgate engaged in was to give the pan-European performances of Christian ritual a local habitation and a secular, even commercial, form. Secular performances naturally followed the church calendar, because there was no “alternative, secular reckoning of time,” as Eamon Duffy notes, and thus the liturgical calendar with its public seasonal rounds of celebration and penance by default provided the rhythms of the festive year.53 In addition to that default linkage to the liturgical calendar, Lydgate’s vernacular poetry sometimes had a more pointed connection to religious ritual, drawing on occasion directly from the liturgy, as in the verse translations he made of the liturgical calendar and of devotions from the Latin primer, presumably for use by his various patrons and readers around the Bury monastery or court.
While his mummings do not translate liturgical plays in any direct fashion, they are indebted to them in a number of ways. In the case of the Mumming for the Mercers, the calendrical link was to Twelfth Night, or the Feast of the Epiphany, the last day of the twelve-day Christmas season. Epiphany was traditionally associated with the biblical story of the Magi, and since at least the twelfth century had been an occasion for dramatic enactments of the appearance of the star and the coming and inquiry of the three kings, both of which feature in the antiphon and response in the liturgy for Epiphany.54 Gordon Kipling has convincingly argued that in a diffuse way not tied to a specific day of the year, royal entries borrowed the gift giving associated with Epiphany, as civic officials gave actual or symbolic gifts to the royal visitor entering the city, thus performing “a symbolic act of recognition and acclamation.”55 A similar echoing of the themes of Epiphany can be seen, even if ingeniously obliquely, in Lydgate’s recasting of three visitors bearing gifts as a visit from a pursuivant who passes a trio of ships bearing symbolic mottoes and, in the final stanza, “certein estates” come to honor the mayor.
Out of its mixing of epistolary and lyric discourses and allusions drawn from biblical narrative, liturgical plays, classical mythology, and the vernacular tradition, the Mumming for the Mercers constructs a vernacular poetics grounded in an urban-national geography and, as Maura Nolan notes, associated with the origins of poetry (“Cyrrea” and “Parnaso”) and with the practice of mumming. The mumming features an East-West axis populated by figures who, in Nolan’s view, “represented the cultural capital of the aristocratic and royal elites,” and it dramatizes the assimilation of the alien messenger and oriental merchants into the socioeconomic milieu of the mayor and guildsmen. The welcoming of those outsiders conveys the impression in the mumming that mercantile London is capable of absorbing potentially alien groups along with their cultural products, especially poetry.
The “famous rethorycyens” and “musycyens” the mumming invokes include Ovid, Vergil, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and Lydgate nods toward French vision poetry in the mumming, but no English writers are mentioned. Nolan argues that this notable lack of reference to vernacular poetry throws into relief the relations between a foreign (European or classical) poetics and a native cultural practice (mumming); the omission of Chaucer, an author Lydgate is in other instances happy to claim as an inspiration, stresses an unmediated relation to a European poetic tradition and Lydgate’s “own centrality to the didactic project of the text and performance” presented through a translatio of European culture.56 (The other translatio at work in the mumming is of the liturgical material, as I noted above, with the beckoning star and the visit of the three kings bearing gifts for the Christ child transformed into Phoebus’s light, the pursuivant’s journey, the three traveling ships, and the merchants who come to visit London’s mayor.) Whether or not he sees a distinction between a foreign poetics and a native performance, in describing Lydgate’s rhyme-royal stanzas as a ballade, Shirley calls attention to the high literariness of the verses being presented to the Mercers, as well as to their foreignness.
The practice of mumming itself may be less the point of contrast with European culture than is the description of the verses as a letter. That is, the opposition is not between poetry and performance but between two forms of vernacular writing: ballade and letter. And that opposition is not really one, since as Shirley’s headnote says, the ballade and the letter are one and the same: what the pursuivant brings to the mayor is a “lettre made in wyse of balade.” Shirley does not explain how the ballade-letter was used in the performance, but presumably it was read aloud by the pursuivant to accompany the actions of the costumed mummers. If that is what happened during the performance, then the mayor and audience would have seen a familiar kind of vernacular writing used to convey not the pragmatic information expected from the form but poetry. With its ballade-letter, then, and the contrast between expectations raised visually by the delivery of the letter and actual contents heard aurally as its rhyme-royal verses were read aloud, the Mumming for the Mercers domesticates the exotic use of the vernacular represented by the ballade as a genre and by the verses’ poetic form and their allusions to a European poetic tradition. The effect would have been intensified in performance given that the sudden appearance of the pursuivant “recalls the romance conventions of other courtly revels,” as Clopper observes, and that the journey described in Lydgate’s ballade traverses “an allegorical romance landscape,” all of which occurs within the familiar setting of a hall in a London guildhall or house.57
The likelihood that spectators grasped those cultural references is increased by the reputation mercers had for being well educated and intellectually curious. Books were among the piece-goods mercers traded in and are mentioned in mercers’ wills; apprentice mercers were expected to be able to read, write, and count and would have improved their French or Dutch during travels to the continent. The Mercers’ Company owned many books, including accounts, deeds, registers, and reference books, as well as books for their chapel and even literary manuscripts (including, later in the century, copies of Lydgate’s writings), and they employed Adam Pinkhurst, Chaucer’s scribe, as late as 1427.58 The mercers who watched Lydgate’s mumming in 1430 would have been familiar with practical writing in English, including the writing of letters, and, through their travels to the continent, acquainted with the French language.59 Like other literate members of the prosperous urban classes, they may also have had an awareness of French poetry, given the extent to which French culture formed part of the English literary landscape.60
Despite mercers’ educational attainments, Shirley’s extensive glosses explaining Lydgate’s allusions imply that he felt—accurately or not—that his intended readers would need help assimilating the poetic and classical references in the mumming.61 In English and Latin, his marginal notes explain that “Mars is god of batayle,” “Tulius a poete and a rethorisyen of Rome,” “Phebus in Aquario is als miche to seyne as thanne the sonne is in that signe,” and so on. Although Shirley’s intended audience for the manuscript that contained the Mummingfor the Mercers was probably the Beauchamp household in which he had served for so many years, it is worth noting that Shirley also had connections with mercers.62 Roger Amorigy, a mercer, was connected with “a crowd of literati,” including Shirley, who lived in or near St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and John Carpenter, common clerk of the city (1417–38), was an executor of the will of the mercer Richard Whittington.63 Those connections do not necessarily translate into the ability to catch clerical and courtly references, but they at least suggest an awareness of literary culture and its value in a mercantile milieu.
The Mumming for the Goldsmiths, performed less than a month later, similarly features a visit from outsiders and links poetry to civic aspirations. The mumming mixes homage, praise, veiled advice, and wishful thinking offered by the Goldsmiths to Estfeld in an evening performance on Candlemas, a festival in honor of the presentation of the infant Jesus in the temple and the purification of the Virgin Mary. Jesse, David, and the twelve tribes of Israel who figure in the mumming were traditionally associated with Candlemas, since they emphasize the lineage of Jesus. Candlemas plays were already known in the vernacular by the time Lydgate wrote his verses for the Goldsmiths, and six extant Middle English play-texts on the subject have survived.64 In the N-Town play of the Purification, for instance, which includes a speech by Simeon that is a literal translation of the opening psalm of the mass of the feast, the liturgical song “Nunc dimittis” is sung, Jesus distributes candles, and the main characters process to the altar—all echoes of the liturgy.65 The Digby Candlemas play includes similar elements along with a sermon spoken by Simeon that echoes Candlemas homilies in its comparison of the candle to Christ. The Digby play includes dances, which in Duffy’s view show “the links between liturgical observation and the ‘secular’ celebratory and ludic dimensions of lay culture at the end of the Middle Ages.”66 That Lydgate’s play handles the traditional material of Candlemas as loosely as it does may be because, as Nolan observes, the Mumming for the Goldsmiths is embedded in a particularly dense referential field: allusions to Candlemas shape the text, but they are only one among many references out of which Lydgate builds his mumming.67 That mixing of references makes sense given the reminder offered by Amy Appleford and Nicholas Watson about “the seriousness with which privileged Londoners took their religion” and the extent to which they embraced literary works that “taught them how to be saved as people living in the world of trade and exchange.”68
Like the oriental merchants of the Mumming for the Mercers, the Israelites in the Mumming for the Goldsmiths bring gifts to the mayor, this time not the goods that the company trades in but rather symbolic treasures “boþe hevenly and moral,” having to do with, in the words of the presenter, “good gouuernuance” (ll. 19–20). Chief among these symbols of good governance is the Ark of the Covenant, which, the presenter promises, will ensure both long prosperity for the city and protection for the mayor and the citizens of the town, keeping the city perpetually “at rest” (ll. 27–28, 68, 77). As the latter claim implies, one of the values of the ark is its peacekeeping propensity, of use for settling both internal and external threats to urban order.
The ark contains three gifts for the mayor—“konnyng, grace and might”—which are designed to help him govern with “wisdome, pees and right” (ll. 81–82) and to ordain just laws about which no man will complain, along with a writ that specifies which offenses the mayor should punish and which he should overlook, as well as when he should exercise mercy.69 As long as the ark stays with the mayor, the presenter promises, adversity will be banished and “pees and rest, welfare and vnytee” (l. 97) will reign throughout the city. The not-so-hidden message in these lines is that the mayor is expected by the Goldsmiths to exercise his office effectively and fairly, assuring the smooth running of the city and therefore the continued profitability of its mercantile communities. Disorder, unrest, and lawlessness must be cast out in order for the commercial enterprises of the city to thrive. Along with its gifts to the mayor, the mumming offers, then, a pointed reminder of his responsibilities as the chief authority of the city.
Although there is no reference to this mumming in their records, the Goldsmiths possessed the wherewithal for a “fresshe and costelé” performance such as this one. The company had a tradition of entertainments on its annual St. Dunstan’s Day feast and in mayoral processions; it owned musical instruments as well as a “summer-castle” that (equipped with “virgins” throwing silver leaves) was used in the entry of Richard II in 1377 and again in 1382, and on occasion it hired minstrels and choristers from St. Paul’s.70 The Goldsmiths’ pageantry was well enough known for Henry VI to refer to it in a letter of 1444–45, in which he requested a lavish display for Queen Margaret’s entry.71 The Goldsmiths were one of two guilds known to have had a hall by the end of the fourteenth century, having acquired a site for it in the parish of St. John Zachary in 1357, where they built a hall, kitchen, parlor, and other chambers.72
We do not know how the Goldsmiths came to commission these verses from Lydgate, but their prestige could have brought some of them into orbit with Lydgate’s circle. London goldsmiths, who in 1404 numbered 102 men in the livery company (the elite group) plus another eighty out of the livery, were substantial citizens, involved in London’s government and with an international reputation as skilled craftsmen.73 As makers of luxury goods, goldsmiths had contacts with the wealthy and powerful: John Orewell, for example, who was the king’s engraver, made a silver-gilt crozier for the abbot of Bury St. Edmunds in 1430, and in 1379–80, Edward III’s daughter Isabella, the mayor, Lord Latimer, the Master of St. John of Clerkenwell, and others were invited to one of the Goldsmiths’ feast.74
As he did for the verses Lydgate wrote for the Mercers, Shirley describes the Mumming for the Goldsmiths as a letter in the style of a ballade, once again juxtaposing two kinds of vernacular writing. As Shirley’s headnote shows, those two terms are further complicated by the addition of the term mumming and by a use of syntax and prepositions that makes parsing the phrase difficult: “And nowe filowethe a lettre made in wyse of balade by Ledegate Daun Johan of a mommynge” (see Figure 2).75 The sense of the first part of what Shirley is attempting to convey seems clear: what he has copied is a letter in verse that Lydgate has composed. But the second part is harder to decipher: are the following verses a ballade-like letter meant to serve as a guide for the makers of the mumming, or are they a ballade-like letter meant to be used in the mumming or some combination of both of those possibilities? Shirley’s headnote does not provide an answer, and the running titles describing the verses as a disguising add further confusion, but the verses themselves offer some plausible suggestions as to what Lydgate’s verses represent. No speaker is identified in those verses, but the herald named Fortune, who is described by Shirley as presenting the ballade-letter to the mayor, probably read the fourteen rhyme-royal stanzas aloud to introduce the mummers, who mimed the actions of David and the twelve tribes of Israel. Lydgate echoes his technique in the Mercers’ mumming of mixing the courtly (e.g., the herald; “royal gyftes,” l. 6, for the mayor, and references to Troy), the biblical (with an emphasis on lineage via the Jesse Tree, Mary, Jesus, and Samuel’s anointing of David), and the mercantile (stressing good governance). He also deftly combines flattery of the mayor with an assertion of the need for humble and responsible service in office, demonstrating his ability to craft entertainments for London’s wealthy and politically influential establishment that celebrate London and its values, while also subtly voicing concerns about civic government and mayoral power.76
Once again, Lydgate describes a series of figures who travel from afar, in this instance from Jerusalem, to “comen to þis citee” to bring the mayor “royal” gifts and “to seen and to vysyte” him (ll. 5–7). Lydgate supplements the travels of David and the Israelites with references to the sacred image of the Palladium, which was kept at the temple of Athena in Troy, joining religious and classical allusions. And once again, the sweep of the journey has the effect of making London the welcoming port for foreign travelers whose gifts will set the city perpetually at rest (ll. 76–77). Although the mumming is ostensibly being performed for the mayor, whom it directly addresses, Lydgate’s verses stress a city-to-city exchange between Jerusalem (and Troy) and London, as David comes “Frome his cytee of Ihersualem” “in-to þis tovne” (ll. 22, 25). The verses refer to London a total of six times, describing it variously as “þis citee,” “þis tovne,” and, once, “þis noble cytee.” The impression left by this linking is of London as a New Jerusalem as well as a “Nuwe Troye,” as Lydgate explicitly calls it in the tenth stanza.
Figure 2. Mumming for the Goldsmiths (headnote and ll. 1–17, following last stanza of Mumming for the Mercers). Cambridge, Trinity College Library MS R.3.20, p. 175. By permission of the library.
Complicating the opposition between practical English letters and continental poetry, the mumming introduces a third form of vernacular writing, in the form of the writ that is inside the ark brought by the Israelites. The writ, which specifies how the mayor should “punysshe” and “spare” (l. 87), contains echoes of the biblical commandments given to Moses while also calling to mind a specific documentary practice of late medieval England. In its legal sense, a writ of the later medieval period was an official letter issued by the chancery on the king’s behalf, bestowing a privilege or issuing an instruction. It was usually written on one side of a sheet of paper and delivered open and ratified with a royal seal, and after 1422 was, along with other chancery material, increasingly likely to be written in English.77 Lydgate may be using the term more broadly to embrace any written document, but his description of the writ as a piece of writing that will “declare” and “pleynly specefye” (ll. 85–86) to the mayor how he should carry out the acts of justice associated with his office carries the instructive force of a chancery-issued writ. Lydgate’s verses do not make clear whether the writ was read aloud as part of the performance or whether it was left with the mayor for private reading at a later date. Whatever its method of delivery, as a form of directive writing, the writ is more complex than simple gifts of wine or wheat, as Nolan notes, since it demands “an active and engaged response” from the mayor.78
With their status as short pieces of vernacular writing, Lydgate’s letter and writ fit within the context of pamphleteering that saw bills, broadsides, pamphlets, and poems circulating throughout London in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Bills and libels were posted on the doors of Westminster or St. Paul’s, Lollard tracts were disseminated widely, the 1381 rebels wrote pseudonymous letters, and pamphleting campaigns were waged by political rivals.79 Clementine Oliver has argued that these short, often polemical, texts “are urban artefacts formed by the intersection of parliament and the clerkly culture of those civil servants who lived and worked in the city of London in the late fourteenth century.”80 Lydgate meshes neatly with none of those contexts, and yet, as Joel Fredell has pointed out, he, too, participated in the pamphleting culture. Fredell argues that many of the first pamphlets in Middle English were in fact poems, and broadsides and court lyrics were both called “bills” and circulated on single sheets “as contending voices in the same material form.” As Fredell notes, Lydgate was “clearly aware of the many possible media outlets for his poetry” and in writing a number of his short poems of the 1420s translated his aureate style into a new discursive field.81
As a poetic letter that was publicly performed, the mumming harnesses a vernacular literary cosmopolitanism to the display of power, even as its content—and especially the “wrytt withinn” (l. 85)—urges the need to wield authority with moderation. Like the Mumming for the Mercers a month earlier, the Mumming for the Goldsmiths depicts legendary or otherwise distinguished visitors being welcomed into “þis cytee” in a way that makes mercantile London appear both inviting and worthy of foreign attention. In both mummings, the pursuivant is described as descending “dovne” when they arrive, suggesting the honor that the arrival of the mummers disguised as foreign merchants or the twelve tribes brings to the mayor. The gift of poetry supplied by Lydgate’s verses can be seen as conferring a similar honor, while also affirming the cultural prominence of the guildsmen who heard and appreciated it.
Although not intended for performance for one of London’s companies, the Mumming at Bishopswood and the Disguising at London share some of the features and functions of the mummings for the Mercers and Goldsmiths. Their venues and audiences are more expansive, but they exhibit a similar construction of London and show the same interest in crafting a vernacular cosmopolitanism that meshes the literary with the practical.
Shirley describes the Mumming at Bishopswood as a “balade” in his headnote to the verses—not a letter in ballade form—made by Lydgate for a May Day dinner of London’s sheriffs and their “bretherne” at Bishop’s Wood, a place owned by the bishop of London.82 Henry MacCracken calls Bishopswood a mumming, but Shirley does not, and, unlike most other fourteenth- and fifteenth-century mummings, including those for the Goldsmiths and Mercers, it did not take place during the Christmas season, although it does feature the visit of outsiders bearing gifts that is characteristic of the genre. No presenter is identified, but the messenger (described by Shirley as a “poursyvant”) who brought the ballade may have read it aloud while silent characters impersonated Ver (Spring) and possibly Flora (although the text implies that she is not present), as well as May (if May is a figure distinct from Ver, something the text leaves unclear). The running titles at the top of the page identify the verses as “Lydegates balades sente / To þe Shreves dyner,” echoing the phrasing of Shirley’s headnote and again suggesting that a pursuivant delivered and perhaps spoke the lines. There may also have been a musical interlude by figures from classical mythology (i.e., Venus, Cupid, and Orpheus, at ll. 99–105). These lines may be meant merely as a poetic description, but music was apparently a part of the mumming for the Goldsmiths, as suggested by the instruction in lines 33–34 that the Levites sing. If Bishopswood was mimetically performed rather than simply read aloud, it would have required four performers (a presenter and three silent actors) and thus, although there is no evidence that actors were hired for the occasion, would match the size of the usual London performing company of the period.83
Bishopswood is undated, but Derek Pearsall places it in May 1429, arguing that it might have accompanied the mummings for the Mercers and Goldsmiths earlier that year; if Pearsall is correct, the actual date would have to be May 1430, since Estfeld was mayor from 29 October 1429 to 29 October 1430.84 Noting that the coronation of Henry VI in London on 6 November 1429 might have raised ordinary festivities to a higher level in the next six months, Lancashire posits May Day of 1430 as a likely date for a special commission from Lydgate for the sheriffs’ dinner, especially since he had provided entertainments for the coronation ceremonies.85 A wider range of dates for the mumming cannot be ruled out, however, since the sole extant copy is in Bodleian MS Ashmole 59, which Shirley compiled in 1447–49 while resident in the close of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. Shirley’s inclusion of Bishopswood in that manuscript while he did not recopy any of the mummings from Trinity MS R.3.20, which he used as a partial exemplar for MS Ashmole 59, may suggest that he did not have a copy of Bishopswood when he made R.3.20 in the early 1430s, either because it had not yet been performed or, more probably, because a copy had not yet been given to him.86 Stow included the first two stanzas, derived from MS Ashmole 59, which passed through his hands, in his Survey of London (1598), as an example of the “great Mayings and maygames made by the gouernors and Maisters of this Citie,” a remark that may be historically inaccurate given that the earliest recorded May game in London dates to 1458 and took place in the parish of St. Nicholas Shambles.87
Still, it is clear that Bishopswood was designed to celebrate the changing seasons, which Lydgate accomplishes through a mixing of the social and the literary in a poetic presentation of springtime sweeping away winter’s woes. The mumming consists of sixteen rhyme-royal stanzas that offer political and social commentary embedded within praise of the coming of spring, in the guise of Flora’s daughter, Ver, who bids flowers to bloom and birds to sing, as signs that winter has fled. Ver also ushers in prosperity, peace, and unity after the adversity and troubles of winter, and the nature imagery soon develops into a social and political commentary that imagines all estates united, with each fulfilling its proper duties so that righteousness destroys the “darkness” of extortion and leads to a joyful summer.88 While much of this commentary is a conventional reflection on the proper roles of the various estates, it may also address real contemporary concerns, especially in its references to discord and dissension. Like many of Lydgate’s other poems for Londoners, Bishopswood speaks to the concerns and aspirations of the city’s elites, particularly for order and prosperity.
Sheriffs in later medieval London were elected annually by a select group of probi homines from the city. Like aldermen, sheriffs were honorary officers of the city, served by a large household and their own court, perhaps the “bretherne” referred to by Shirley, including an extensive staff of civil servants and sergeants who assisted them. Their duties included guarding the counties of London and Middlesex, keeping the assizes of bread and ale, executing royal writs after showing them to the mayor and city counsel, and serving as the mayor’s deputy. In addition to being civic officials charged with maintaining law and order in the city, sheriffs were royal agents, responsible for rendering account to the barons of the Exchequer for the city’s financial obligations and for carrying out the king’s demands for the arrest of criminals and the execution of traitors or heretics as well as for declaring royal proclamations. They also had jurisdiction over Middlesex as well as London, a dual role that Caroline Barron notes was problematic, despite the link between the city and the county. In 1385, the common council stipulated that every mayor should first serve as sheriff so as to have his “governance and bountee” tested.89 In May 1430, the two sheriffs were a goldsmith and a merchant tailor.90 Although the recipient of the mumming’s honorific addresses—the person addressed in such phrases as “youre hye renoun” (l. 35) and “youre Hye Excellence” (l. 80)—is unnamed, it is possible that Bishopswood may have honored Mayor Estfeld.91 Whoever the exact addressee, the audience of sheriffs, aldermen, and prosperous Londoners assembled for this mumming resembled the audiences for other forms of late medieval civic drama, including the “sovereigns” mentioned in many plays, terms that entered English as borrowings from a French courtly style during the reign of Richard II.92 Lydgate’s adoption of similar terms for the Bishopswood audience aligns his mumming with other civic performances pitched to affluent urban citizens.
What we know about that audience, including its sharing in elite literary tastes, suggests it would have been receptive to the transformational tactics of the Mumming at Bishopswood, with its echoes of Chaucer and French poetry.93 Ver, for example, is a relatively uncommon personification in Middle English poetry, as Norton-Smith notes, but Chaucer uses it in Troilus and Criseyde (l. 157).94 Bishopswood also echoes a passage from Chaucer’s House of Fame on Orpheus’s music (ll. 1201ff), draws on the Parliament of Fowls for the notion of spring as a season in which birds choose mates, and references the Canterbury Tales in a variety of ways, including in its emphasis on the social order. These and other poachings show Lydate’s reliance on not just a Chaucerian but also a French poetics that Chaucer himself wrote within. As Ardis Butterfield has argued, Chaucer himself “participated in a broad literary culture . . . that was shaped and inspired by writers in French.” Chaucer’s poetry shows less a pattern of borrowing from the French, Butterfield notes, than evidence of a network of relationships between England and France that extended back for several hundred years, making Chaucer to a large extent “always ‘already’ French.”95 Whether through Chaucer or through the continuing and pervasive influence of French cultural habits or through direct contact with French texts, Lydgate created in Bishopswood verses that had the same “always ‘already’ French” feel, now being explicitly presented to London’s sheriffs and their guests.96
While his indebtedness to French literary culture is apparent, to what degree French performances influenced Lydgate’s mummings remains uncertain. In various ways, his mummings resemble court and civic performances in France, including those in which costumed courtiers performed for aristocratic audiences or puys and confréries put on plays. Some of these sorts of performances must have been familiar to Lydgate through transmission to England, and others he may have seen firsthand while he was in France in the 1420s.97 As Nolan notes, however, none of these performances have yet been identified as direct sources for the verses of Lydgate’s mummings, even if they most likely guided his assumptions about what a mumming should—or could—be.98
Whether its source lies in poetry or performance—or some mix of the two, as is most likely—the vernacular cosmopolitanism of Bishopswood relies on assimilation of a French-inflected poetics to English writing, a poetics that carried with it a sense of prestige and high status.99 It also, and in a parallel process, adopts forms derived from other kinds of socially elevated performances. As Walter Schirmer observes, Bishopswood innovatively blends pantomime-type pageants such as those found in royal entries and didactic scholastic drama such as the Pageant of Knowledge, and Pearsall points to its learned philosophical and scientific description of spring.100 Like the Mumming for the Mercers, Bishopswood presents its audience with a classical poetic tradition (Parnasaus, Citherra, Caliope, Orpheus) imagined as increasing the prosperity, welfare, and happiness of the mumming’s audience. The ballade, classical allusions, learned references, and nod to other types of performance all serve to make the literary a vehicle for social and economic values of benefit to the assembled sheriffs, aldermen, and other prosperous Londoners. The result is what James Simpson calls “a heterogeneous collage of differently figured histories” and aesthetic forms.101
Bishopwood’s use of a pursuivant is one example of this collage effect. Like the herald who delivers the “lettre made in wyse of balade” to the Goldsmiths, the pursuivant carries specific ceremonial connotations. A pursuivant was a messenger, an attendant on a herald, or a junior heraldic officer attached to a royal or noble household. In the twelfth century, heralds were household servants, but in later years, they developed specific roles as keepers of chivalric devices and records and as celebrators of chivalric deeds, while also playing a part in “political, diplomatic, and administrative contexts,” as Katie Stevenson has noted.102 Besides administering tournaments, heralds also made announcements and proclamations, carried letters, and served as masters-of-ceremonies; in wardrobe accounts, they are often grouped with minstrels and other performers, explaining the frequent conflation in medieval documents of heralds and minstrels. In identifying the deliverer of the ballades for the sheriff’s dinner and in other mummings as a pursuivant, it may be that Shirley is using terminology and citing personages familiar to him from his time in Beauchamp’s household. It is also possible, however, that these mummings featured presenters costumed in this courtly fashion. Pursuivants and heralds were increasingly coming to be used in private ceremonies, however, suggesting a slippage from courtly to other milieu.103 The use of a pursuivant in this mumming has the effect, then, of transferring ceremonial activities traditionally associated with the king to the mayor, sheriffs, and assembled estates, an effect consistent with the relocating of royal privilege signaled by the “honorable” nature of the dinner the sheriffs attended and by the honorifics used to address the mumming’s recipients.
Lydgate includes a passage in the Troy Book that describes what he imagines classical tragedy to have been like in performance, and while the passage has often been dismissed as a typically inaccurate medieval understanding of ancient performance practices, it may offer information about contemporary mummings, as Glynne Wickham suggests.104 Lydgate describes a theater in which a poet stood at a pulpit and recounted (“rad or songyn” 2:862) the deeds and, specifically, the falls of famous men while visored actors came out, “Pleying by signes in the peples sight, / That the poete songon hathe on hight” (2:903–4). These performances occurred, Lydgate says, in April or May, just as springtime was beginning, a calendrical association with Bishopswood’s May Day setting that may imply a connection in Lydgate’s mind between the ancient performance envisioned in the Troy Book and the 1420s one for London’s sheriffs. Since no poet is mentioned in the Mumming at Bishopswood, the pursuivant may have read the verses aloud while costumed mummers mimed along with them, a performance mode that would have been consistent with the role of heralds and pursuivants as participants in ceremonies and as conveyors of messages.
The expansion of milieu beyond London’s companies found in Lydgate’s verses and in the mumming’s performance venue is echoed in the manuscript into which the Mumming at Bishopswood was copied. Margaret Connolly argues that MS Ashmole 59 lacks a preface not because it once had one that later was lost but that, unlike Shirley’s two earlier anthologies, BL MS Add. 16165 and Trinity MS R.3.20, it was “never intended for circulation in the same type of context as the preceding anthologies.” Much later in date than the earlier anthologies, more serious in tone, and compiled when Shirley had left Beauchamp’s service and was living in the precincts of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, MS Ashmole 59 apparently did not have as its primary audience the noble household of which he himself had once been a member.105 Instead, the prosperous members of the clergy and laity residing in St. Bartholomew’s Close seem likely to have constituted the audience for Shirley’s last anthology.106 If that was indeed the case, then Bishopswood was read by individuals who, like those present at its performance for the sheriffs, were part of an urban and bourgeois milieu, not a courtly one, even if, like the sheriffs, they may have had affiliations that brought them into contact with spheres beyond the civic. Those readers, like the assembled guests at the mumming, may have welcomed the themes of peace, prosperity, and social wholeness advanced in Lydgate’s verses, with their insistence that “Of alle estates there shal beo oone image” (l. 50). “Troubles exylinge,” Ver once again repairs what “winter hathe so fade” (ll. 72, 86), a hopeful message that urban clergy and laity may well have been happy to embrace.
While the evidence is inconclusive, it is tempting to link the Disguising at London with Lydgate’s other mummings for the heightened ceremonial year of 1429–30. Shirley says it was made “for the gret estates of this lande, thanne being at London,” which has led to the supposition that Lydgate wrote it for a gathering of parliament. Parliament met at Westminster from 22 September 1429 to 23 February 1430, although Pearsall notes that a disguising for that session would probably have mentioned the coronation of Henry VI on 6 November 1429.107 There may, however, be oblique reference to that event, in the disguising’s inclusion of Henry V among the “prynces of latter date” (l. 266) who were guided by virtue, an inclusion that would have particular force in a year in which Henry’s son assumed power (the subtleties for the coronation banquet similarly made reference to Henry V). Whatever the precise date or occasion, the text makes clear that the disguising was designed for household performance (ll. 335 and 337) during the long Christmas season (l. 280) that ran from October through early January; the hope expressed in line 334 that the virtues bestowed by the disguising will last “al this yeer” may locate the performance more precisely on a day in early January.
The disguising has the feel of a “mirror for princes,” recast for a broader audience and responsive to the political instability of the late 1420s.108 It opens with the appearance of Dame Fortune, whose dangerous mutability sets the stage for the introduction of the four cardinal virtues—Dames Prudence, Righteousness, Fortitude, and Temperance—who promise to defend all who serve them. The disguising’s 342 lines of rhyming couplets consist of lengthy descriptions of each of the four virtues in turn, ending with a song that banishes fickle Fortune. As with the other mummings for the Londoners in 1429–30, a central concern of the disguising is good governance, which is seen as a remedy for Fortune’s dangerous instability; the gift giving associated with the mumming takes the abstract form in Lydgate’s verses of gifts of virtue, which the disguising promises will reside “in this housholde” (l. 335) for the year. The disguising suggests that embracing virtue will lead to good governance and hence offers protection against misfortune. Although the disguising was apparently performed on a national, not a municipal, occasion, its values “are practical and bourgeois,” as Benson notes, and its tone is optimistic, emphasizing “the sort of pragmatic, decent, and well-regulated communal behavior advocated by medieval London citizens.”109 Nolan argues that the disguising aims “to develop a notion of virtue fit for the public realm of politics, a secularized (though hardly secular) code of behavior particularly suited to the governing classes.”110 There is certainly no lack of evidence suggesting that a performance featuring the virtues would have appeal both at court and in the city, and the virtues were even visually represented in both venues: the king’s bedroom at Westminster contained a painting of the virtues battling the vices, while the rebuilt Guildhall (1411–30) included statues of Fortitude, Justice, Temperance, and Discipline.111
Lydgate’s verses contain numerous hints about the performance for which they were written and seem especially “script-like,” as Kipling has noted.112 Entrances are marked by brief stage directions, the narrator interacts with the audience and the actors (by drawing attention to the arrival of each new character, banishing Fortune, and commanding the four virtues to sing), and the text specifies several stage properties (Prudence’s mirror, Righteousness’s balance, Fortitude’s sword). The lack of dialogue suggests that a presenter probably read the text aloud, as Fortune and the four virtues made their appearances. Although there is no indication of the actions they might have performed, Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter think that the four virtues may have presented the “gift” of their attributes to the presiding dignitaries.113 The final lines of the disguising command the four protectors to sing “Some nuwe songe aboute the fuyre” (ll. 338–40), implying that the disguising ended with music.
Although described by Shirley not as a letter or a ballade but rather as a “devyse” (a plan), the Disguising at London is heavily indebted to a literary poetics—French, classical, and English—particularly in its allusions to and paraphrases of the Roman de la Rose and its use of the literary tradition of the falls of great men, including in Chaucer’s “Monk’s Tale.”114 Lydgate explicitly mentions the Roman in line 9, and his opening description of Fortune closely follows the Roman. Nolan argues that in this disguising, Lydgate connects Chaucer’s ideas about tragedy and comedy to dramatic performance, thus producing a text that “seeks to carve out a space for literary art in public performance,” although one could argue for the same carving out in the other mummings for Londoners as well.115
Parliament would have been a particularly appropriate venue for such a performance, given its importance as an arena for not just political debate but also public display and artistic efforts. As Matthew Giancarlo has shown, by the late fourteenth century, parliament was a social and literary, as well as a political, event.116 As a large assembly drawing many groups of people, parliament was a forum for popular communication in the vernacular that could take a variety of forms, including ceremonies, speeches, sermons, and petitions, among others. Increasingly, this communication was in English, making parliament a prominent force behind the growing prestige of the vernacular.117
When Shirley copied the Disguising at London into Trinity MS R.3.20, along with the mummings for the Mercers and Goldsmiths, he seems to have been intent on making sure readers grasped the “moral, plesaunt, and notable” nature of the disguising that he praised with those words in his headnote. To that end, he included various marginal notes commenting on personages or references in Lydgate’s verses. Next to the description of Julius Caesar in lines 67–70, he notes that “Sesar a bakars son”; he cites a chapter of Ecclesiastes on good and bad women; he adds the Latin gloss “i. providencia” at line 165, presumably to make sure that readers know that the “lady” being referred to is Providence; and he glosses Lydgate’s “commune proufyte” (the usual Middle English translation of res publica) in line 251 as “i. republica.” Shirley’s copies of the performances for the Goldsmiths and, more extensively, the Mercers are similarly glossed in Latin and English to explain allusions, personages, or biblical scriptures on which Lydgate draws. Some of those glosses may have originated in his exemplars, but others appear to be his own additions. Whatever their source, the result is to make classical and other allusions accessible to the reader, an enhanced value unavailable to those who merely watched the performances. It may indeed be the case, as Nolan suggests, that Lydgate’s mummings and disguisings are in part literary works “in search of educated and savvy readers,” but Shirley’s glosses recognize what is latent in Lydgate’s verses: that such readers can be actively made as well as passively found.118
A city such as London, as David Harris Sacks notes, was a shifting mix of “openness to the world of commerce and industry and closeness behind protective walls.”119 Although institutions such as the guild system, the shrievalty, and even parliament helped impose an orderly grid on urban life, lines of demarcation were often unclear, with overlapping markets and levels of authority, and with people, goods, and ideas passing into and out of the city. Medieval London was both an autonomous civic polity defined by its walled borders and a territory that spilled outside those borders and that was invaded by outsiders from the king and prelates to visiting traders and members of parliament. It was a city in which civic authority was pressured by the demands of crown and church. As Lydgate’s mummings and disguising for Londoners show, it was also a city eager to establish its prestige, not least through poetry and ceremony that embraced cosmopolitanism.
Textual practices do not exist within a social vacuum but are, as Simpson recognizes, “produced by, and themselves sustain, particular social and political formations.”120 Within the particular formations of fifteenth-century London, Lydgate’s mummings and disguisings for guildsmen, sheriff, and members of parliament simultaneously commemorate public occasions and construct an imaginary public. That public, while made up chiefly of elites, is nonetheless broad and even at times fractured.121 What Lydgate offers those who commissioned and watched his entertainments was the promise of making fractured publics whole. He may only uneasily use the language of common profit that characterizes the public poetry of Chaucer and his other literary forebears, but the verses he wrote for performance in and around London achieve a similar end, by aesthetic and ceremonial means.
Andrew Galloway has persuasively argued for the importance of Lydgate in the development of what scholars have termed vernacular humanism. A form of humanism that broadened and extended, in Galloway’s words, “the power of classical interests and their social prestige,” vernacular humanism joined interest in classical sources and styles with contemporary concerns, often to promote a new kind of national identity.122 Vernacular humanism offered a way of addressing the national and local implications of ancient thought, making it available for a range of uses beyond the purely scholarly. While Galloway argues for Lydgate’s deep engagement with ancient thought, in contradistinction to Nolan’s reading of Lydgate’s classicism as having been mediated through Chaucer, Gower, and continental writers, both views can coexist, not just for Lydgate as a writer but for his audiences, whose literary tastes may have included direct knowledge of ancient writers, as Galloway claims was the case, as well as awareness of English and continental poetry.123
If vernacular humanism describes one aspect of Lydgate’s literary practice, then vernacular cosmopolitanism defines another. Especially in his mummings and disguisings for urban audiences and, later, readers, Lydgate was as instrumental in shaping a vernacular cosmopolitanism with London as its center as he was in carving out a melding of classical styles and ideas with contemporary historical concerns that would lay the ground for a tradition that would flourish in the sixteenth century.124 Like his vernacular humanism, Lydgate’s vernacular cosmopolitanism allowed him to broaden and expand a style and set of themes derived from continental poets and often filtered through Chaucer. Also like vernacular humanism, vernacular cosmopolitanism is an apparent oxymoron that joins two seemingly contradictory notions and asks that we imagine that the parochial and demotic can coexist with the transnational and sophisticated.125 Lydgate’s mummings and disguising for Londoners achieve that balance, offering to their urban audiences what Benson sees as the hallmark of “civic Lydgate”: poetry that gives shape to “the idea and experience of the city.”126
