GOWER's EARLIEST DATABLE POEM, the French Mirour de l’Omme (c. 1378), has had its modern readers, and increasingly its critical defenders. But many readers of Gower, in modern times and, it seems, his own (judging by Mirour's single surviving copy), seem eager to pass it by. At best it is treated as a reference point for and way-station to the generic and social innovations of the Latin Vox Clamantis, with its dream-vision of the Rebellion of 1381 and its dense reapplications of Ovid's verses, and the more widely read Confessio Amantis, with its unpredictable moralizations of tales from Ovid and other sources. Gower's mention of Mirour in a late colophon listing his major works, not to mention his tomb's location of it among his effigy's triplex head-rest of books, shows his view of its importance, but the colophon's summary of Mirour is the briefest and thinnest of any of the summaries of Gower's books, and the tomb gives it a Latin title that matches neither the colophon nor the book itself. Even the editor of Mirour, G.C. Macaulay, offers outright discouragement from reading it in full:

From the start the fourteenth century was filled with crisis and change, from plague to rebellion, amid political conflict and increasing literacy. Historical writing changed accordingly, although new stable forms appeared in the Prose Brut and Higden’s Polychronicon. Elsewhere, more innovative chronicles in French and Latin jostled with new kinds of English ones, for and by secular as well as clerical readers and writers. This chapter focuses on three from the century’s first half: Robert Mannyng’s Chronicle, Geoffrey le Baker’s Chronica, and Thomas Gray’s Scalachronica. Some historical writing, however, clung to antiquated forms and outlooks down to the century’s end, when both the century’s social conflicts and historiographical diversities came to a head in the 1381 Rebellion. That revolt can best be appreciated against the earlier decades rather than as an abrupt start of major change, and it was with long familiarity with the rebels’ fundamental (and already partly successful) challenges that Thomas Walsingham denounced them using the most traditional monastic genres he could muster.

The proliferation of political complaints, satire and ‘advice’ in poetry and prose surviving from the twelfth century on suggests that medieval England’s steeply hierarchical world was pervaded by political debate and satire, in both of which law, in its tangled conceptual and institutional forms, was a central focus. This is partly because law was crucial to the two most important centres of medieval authority, by which everyone’s lives were in some measure guided: the king and the church. From the Conquest on, those were separate centres of increasingly massive written and unwritten bodies of law, courts and legions of legal professionals, whose numbers grew from the thirteenth century especially. Their proliferation, reliance on payment, and power over those seeking justice but lacking powerful connections or wealth provided fodder for much satire and complaint. Behind institutional systems, some of the fundamental ideas of political authority were paradoxical and continually subject to debate, chief among which was the kind of authority held by the king, clashing with that held by other potentates or wider political representatives, in parliament and elsewhere.

Such writing, whether in Latin, French or – increasingly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – English, often claims to present the voices of ‘common’ subjects of the law, although how truly representative such writing was is ultimately unanswerable. The fiction of constructing politically representative voices in writing, however, has a history and political importance of its own. Thus as well as discussing how the law figures in political writing and political clashes, this chapter will also consider the changing nature of the idea of being a subject of the law, as displayed through the narrators and implied readers of political literature.

Chaucer’s life, from birth as a vintner’s son in the 1340s to burial in Westminster Abbey in 1400, is visible not from literary genius but from his roles as civil servant and diplomat in a period of expanding bureaucracy. His intellectual range and ambitions were unusual for a layman, not only in Latin texts but also astronomy and French and Italian literature, amid other ‘literacies’ suitable for a tangential member of the courtly world. His associations, marriage, and release from a charge of rape can only be dimly and partly discerned. Clearer but still mysterious is his commitment to writing literature only in English, at a time when that lacked nationally identifying authority. Amid the several languages mingled around him in poetry and life, Chaucer’s literary monolinguism may not be simply social positioning but an aesthetic constraint, forcing innovation under formal limits as he did in other ways in poetry.

Chaucer's Retraction, which sums up an impressive span of his literary works while repudiating nearly all of them, fully excepting only ‘the translacion of Boece de Consolacione, and othere books of legends of seintes, and omelies, and moralitee, and devocioun’, has provided readers of all periods with an opportunity both to imagine the penitential outlook that it conveys as Chaucer's final perspective on literature and life, and to take note of the substantial range, quantity and influence of his opus that thereby required such careful admonitions. Its ‘voicing’ is more of a problem even than usual in Chaucer. In all of its medieval copies it appears at the end of The Canterbury Tales, but since it begins by responding to ‘this litel tretys’, presumably The Parson's Tale, the Retraction does not read as though designed to close the unfinished Canterbury Tales as a whole. Possibly, as Charles Owen suggests, The Parson's Tale and Retraction were a completely separate work by Chaucer, a ‘treatise on penance’, imposed on The Canterbury Tales by other hands. All the surviving textual evidence, however, shows that the Retraction's placement and that of Fragment X as a whole was very early, and it may be argued, as Stephen Partridge does, that the rubric introducing the Retraction, ‘heere taketh the makere of this book his leve’, was early or even authorial as well, since its textual variants are best explained as cautious efforts to resolve original ambiguities rather than as the wholesale import of new materials. Even that rubric, therefore, presents a problem of voicing, or rather scripting. Partridge suggests that Chaucer himself there mimed the role of a scribe, and, by encroaching on the scribal territory of a colophon, crafted the ‘fiction of Chaucer's direct supervision and control over the transmission of his text’.

This ‘fiction’ of an author's immediate hand in this – and, implicitly, all further scribal transmissions of his text – epitomizes some of the important problems of his literary presence and absence with which, as is shown below, readers of Chaucer in Lancastrian England grappled.