Royal legislation issued in English between the baptism of Æthelberht of Kent (c. 600 ad) and the reign of Cnut (r. 1016–35) comprises one of Europe’s more remarkable records of early political and legal thought. In it we see the transformation of England from a collection of disputing kingdoms to a nation united under the rule of Wessex in resistance to Viking incursions – all before one such Viking, Cnut (or ‘Canute the Great’), overcame Æthelred II (‘Ethelred the Unready’) and then made full use of the laws maintained by Æthelred and his ancestors, thereby easing the shock of alien rule. No polity of early Western Europe (save Ireland) left such a lengthy record of its reflections on matters of law in its own language. As we will see, this corpus encompasses a range of prose genres beyond those issuing from the royal court; most were read and copied long after the Norman Conquest.

This chapter will provide an overview of how both major and lesser-known Lancastrian writers and texts engage with the law and legal contexts. Covering the period between Henry IV and Prince Edward of Westminster, this chapter will address legal aspects in Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, Osbern of Bokenham’s Mappula Angliae, George Ashby’s Active Policy, John Fortescue’s De laudibus legum Angliae and such anonymous works as the Libelle of Englyshe Polycye in order to demonstrate how they intervened in and commented on shifting legal ideas and practices during the first two-thirds of the fifteenth century.

Attempts to define treason often imply a debate about the very nature and limits of the law, and about the legal authority of governments. Medieval literature reflects such tensions, but also seems to invest imaginatively in the concept of treason to an extent that the history of law alone cannot explain. In this chapter it is argued that treason took on a new shape during the period from the 1260s to the 1340s, and that this was to have a lasting effect on its representation, not just in English law, but also in English culture more generally. This evolution was significantly conditioned by the political turmoils of the period, including the Second Barons’ War of 1264–7, Edward I’s campaigns in Wales and Scotland, Edward II’s conflict with Thomas of Lancaster, and Edward II’s eventual deposition in 1327. Literary texts testify to the legal paradigm-shifts provoked by these events, and to the differences of political principle that underlay them; but they themselves seem to have played a part in the very processes that led to the creation of these new paradigms. What we see in several late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century texts is something of the cultural and political ferment in which new attitudes to treason were formed.

It would appear that little can be gained by parsing Skelton's writings for traces of the law. Among the works securely attributed to him there is no discourse on legal thought or treatise on jurisprudence. Yet the law is never truly absent from Skelton's writings. Legal references appear in a number of his works, including Magnyfycence, A Replycacion Agaynst Certayne Yong Scolers Abjured of Late, and the three Wolsey satires. The religious bile of the Replycacion and its investments in the persecution of heterodox beliefs has been treated by Vincent Gillespie (1997), and Bradin Cormack has expounded the substantial implications of Skelton's ideas in Magnyfycence about the juridical role of the Household (Cormack 2007: 47–84). Cormack's argument that Skelton's views echo the thought of the fifteenth-century jurist John Fortescue is significant, and, I argue, also holds true for other areas of the poet's oeuvre. As for politics, Skelton's three scathing Wolsey satires – Speke Parott, Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? – reveal the poet's intimate familiarity with the workings of the Chancery and the policies of its controversial incumbent, Thomas Wolsey, while the topical poems Howe the Douty Duke of Albany and A Ballade of the Scottysshe Kynge (as well as its revision, Agaynst the Scottes) rely on the audience's ability to pinpoint and contextualise the circumstances surrounding specific political events. Whether in or out of royal grace, Skelton has been thoroughly studied as a politically situated figure (Walker 1988; Scattergood 2014; Hadfield 2009), but no one has yet attempted to distil Skelton's idea of politics from his works and to scrutinise (in senses 2 and 4 of the OED's definition) his ‘theory or practice of government or administration’, his ‘political ideas’ and ‘beliefs’, and ‘the assumptions or principles relating to or underlying any activity … when concerned with questions of power and status in a society’.

This chapter examines Skelton's grasp of legal practice and of the law as a public institution, while teasing out his underlying political ideas and principles.

John Skelton remains challenging for modern audiences. Filled with contradictions, he is a poet in need of a critical introduction. His deep erudition can be daunting: his fondness for Latin interpolations and interjections often produces macaronic lines with a distinctly bookish and even pedantic appearance. Yet Skelton's learned content is often couched in a verse form more readily associated with levity: skeltonics, a convention which he helped to create and, rather eccentrically, also name. This trademark style is characterised by rhyming couplets and short lines, often carrying only two or three stresses, that give his poetry its typically fast pace.

His surviving oeuvre may be modest in size, but his English and Latin poems span a broad gamut of topics, themes and occasions. For a (self-designated) court poet there is remarkably little flattery in his work. Instead, Skelton is perhaps best known for his complex moral allegory, The Bowge of Courte, and his three scathing satires of Henry VIII's despised Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey: Speke Parott, Collyn Clout and Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? The Bowge of Courte is a biting satire of court life, built around the fashionable allegory of the ship-of-state. Skelton's caustic view of life in the immediate orbit of Henry VIII remains one of the most powerful critiques of the arbitrariness of late medieval and early modern court politics. It is as if The Bowge of Courte had been written to anticipate the tumultuous careers of such Tudor courtiers as Sir Thomas Wyatt or, indeed, Skelton himself. The Wolsey satires, on the other hand, mark a milestone in the history of political satire in Britain. With irreverent wit and unmitigated vitriol these three poems unleashed an attack on England's second-most powerful man that caused Skelton to fear for his own life and to seek refuge in the sanctuary of Westminster. Few satirists in English history have dared to match Skelton's radical commitment to this genre. But Skelton's surviving works also include occasional verse, advice literature and even a play, Magnyfycence. Then there is the specific historical and political context in which almost all of his work is embedded, making some of his poems only fully accessible with the firm support of editorial footnotes. A companion volume to Skelton, therefore, has been long overdue.