Like Hoccleve's dedicatory verse and his Series, and like the proem to Kempe's Book, the texts anthologized in John Audelay's Poems and Carols manifest a profound faith in the appeal of the idea of their author's participation in their material realization. The collection, which survives uniquely in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302, is presented as the result of Audelay's own writing, a labour he performed, we are told, in the final throes of a debilitating illness that saw him bedridden and that impaired his sight and his hearing. By advertising the vexed conditions in spite of which his book was made, like Kempe, Audelay was able to make a more credible claim for God's hand in the completion of his work, the poet's logic being that a project so fraught with difficulties might only have been brought to an end through God's grace. Audelay desired to stress his holiness and his worthiness to receive his readers’ gratitude for the book that he brought to them; in return, he hoped, he might procure their prayers for his soul after his death.

Audelay is explicit about this aim in his writing, which is in tune with what is known about his career: he is thought to have begun his professional life as a nobleman's priest before retiring to Haughmond Abbey in Shropshire, where he was employed as a chantry chaplain. Neglected for many years, Audelay's work is now increasingly being read as an eloquent expression of its author's penitential fervour. In the light of the case studies presented in the foregoing chapters, here I argue that Audelay's Poems and Carols could also serve a socially instrumental function akin to that more frequently attributed to the Series and to the Book of Margery Kempe. Like Hoccleve and Kempe, Audelay was no stranger to scandal. In 1417 he was cited as an accessory to his employer's armed attack on an adversary in a London church on Easter Sunday. If Kempe's clerical supporters at Lynn suffered alongside her when her behaviour was criticized, as was argued in Chapter Two, then the deleterious effect of the Easter Sunday attack on Audelay's reputation must have been great: the author of the affray, Richard, Lord Lestrange of Knockin, was both his patron and his spiritual charge.