The statue in the central niche over the West Door of York Minster is a modern rendering of William Melton, the archbishop of York from 1317 to 1340 and the prelate under whom the great rebuilding of the West End of the cathedral church was undertaken. It is fitting to begin this paper with this ecclesiastical image, since it helps us to point up Melton's strong identity both with the Church at large and with the episcopal see of York in particular. Melton's career followed a pattern that was common in England throughout the high and later Middle Ages, whereby clerics who served conspicuously and loyally in the royal administration were rewarded, in the course of time, with episcopal sees. The consequences of such shifting foci, from state service to leadership in the Church, normally guaranteed that the king's interests would be well served both on the bench of bishops in parliament and in the inner workings of the dioceses and of the two ecclesiastical provinces of Canterbury and York.

But it was not always so. The most celebrated case of changed priorities came in the twelfth century with Thomas Becket, who transformed from a friend and minister of Henry II to an ideologically driven defender of the liberties of the Church and, of course, lost his life in the process. There were others who did the same, even if they did not always come to the same gruesome end as Becket. We think here of a series of archbishops of Canterbury, including Stephen Langton, Robert Winchelsey and John Stratford. Closer to home, the tradition of former royal servants turning into champions of the Church was just as strong and self-conscious in the Northern Province. Archbishop Thoresby of York resigned the office of royal chancellor in 1356 as a result of a major row with Edward III over the treatment of the wayward bishop of Ely, Thomas de Lisle; and in 1405, of course, Archbishop Richard Scrope was summarily executed for his leadership of an armed uprising against King Henry IV. In all of these various stands taken by archbishops of Canterbury and York during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there was an element of martyrdom, built sometimes quite self-consciously on the cult of St Thomas Becket, whose tomb at Canterbury Cathedral was of course the premier and most visited shrine in the whole of England.6

The aspect of the political economy that has attracted the most enduring attention of scholars working on the social meanings of W&W relates to Edward III's household management and war finances. The idea that the poem provides a commentary on the financing of the Hundred Years War goes back to a short article by Gardiner Stillwell published in 1941. Stillwell argued that Wynnere's opening speech represented Wastoure as the personification of the state, unjustly extracting hard-earned resources from its subjects to finance its own proud ambitions:

Convinced by Gollancz's dating of the poem to 1352–3, Stillwell compared this passage to the formal record on the parliament roll of 1352 of the grant made by the Commons to the king of a three-year fifteenth and tenth (the standard form of taxation that had been in place in England since 1334). This schedule included a statement that ‘le commune people de la terre fut molt empovery, sibien par la pestilence mortiele qe nadgairs avient en la terre come par autres soviers taxes, taillages et plusours autres chevances qe les ont survenuz’ (‘the common people of the land [are] greatly impov¬erished, as much by the deadly pestilence which they recently suffered in the land as by the frequent taxes, tallages and many other levies which have befallen them’). This was apparently enough to convince Stillwell that the passage in W&W just cited was a veiled allusion to public discontent with the unreasonable economic burden that the king's wars placed on the coun¬try at precisely the moment that the Commons made their tax grant in 1352.

Although W&W is often represented in the critical literature as a debate between the chivalric and the mercantile elements in fourteenth-century society, it is the contention of the present study that the poem is much more preoccupied with the activities, values and attitudes of the landed classes in general, and particularly that large portion of the lay elite that participated actively in the early stages of the Hundred Years War. This chapter argues that W&W references the special tournaments and feast of the Order of the Garter organised by Edward III in 1358, as well as the diplomatic manoeuvres that went on during the later 1350s and the first half of the 1360s around the attempts (many of them sponsored by the papacy) to promote an agenda of lasting peace between England and France. In so doing, we take the terminus ante quem for the composition of the poem into the mid-1360s where, as Chapter 3 argues, we can also best locate the opinions about the political economy that dominate the formal debate between Wynnere and Wastoure. This chapter focuses more on the opening and concluding sections of the poem which, it argues, provide clear evidence of the poet's detailed knowledge not only about the form and nature of the activities of the Order of the Gar¬ter but also about the contemporary controversies, articulated in parliament, about unwelcome papal influence in the kingdom.

An important starting point is the inferred location in which the events of the poem unfold. Previous critics of W&W have commented extensively on its description of the setting in which the debate between Wynnere and Wastoure is called forth and takes place. Yet this location has almost always been seen solely as representing a type – the outdoor theatre or the tourna¬ment arena – rather than a specific, ‘real’ place. The poet finds himself, in his dream, in ‘a loveliche lande that was ylike grene,/ That laye loken by a lawe the lengthe of a myle’ (‘a lovely laund of an even green/That lay encir¬cled by earthworks extending a mile’) (lines 48–9), and from there espies armed men gathered ‘In aythere holte’ (‘In either grove’) (line 50) at the sides of the laund.

The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the fallibility of two previously central arguments in the dating and interpretation of W&W: first, that the poem explicitly references the Statute of Treasons of 1352; and secondly that it commemorates the Black Prince's eyre (judicial visitation) of Cheshire in 1353. More generally, the chapter calls into question the degree to which the poet was concerned with more general issues of public order, and instead emphasises the particular challenges created by the desire of landed society to take matters into its own hands and resolve disputes through armed force. Seeing the ‘trial’ of Wynnere and Wastoure not as a formal judicial process with a plaintiff and a defendant, but rather as a form of royal arbitration between two equally matched (and equally implicated) protagonists, allows a more general discussion of Edward III's record and achievement in provid¬ing informal dispute resolution between his high-status subjects. As in the previous chapter, so in this: a reading of W&W that assumes a composition in the later 1350s or the 1360s allows us to move away from the sometimes reductive nature of previous historicist scholarship on the poem and to offer a new range of possible allusions to contemporary events and controversies surrounding the rule of law.

Early in the poem, we are told that the great assembly gathered before the king includes the forces of two rivals who have already technically bro¬ken the king's peace by unfurling their banners in a state of private war:

It has long been appreciated that W&W presents a satire upon the behav¬iours of the ruling elite, exposing as it does both the greed of the upper orders of society and the recklessness of their lavish lifestyles. The question therefore arises as to how W&W compares with other literary works of social commentary and political complaint of the period. The fourteenth century saw a flourishing of such works, many of which (like W&W) survive only in single manuscripts; had more of the ephemeral literature of the period come down to us, the modern understanding of the authorship, content and reception of complaint literature would not only be all the greater, but possibly rather different in its assumptions around such issues as authorship and audience. There is a sufficient corpus of material, however, to give a strong indication of the nature of this genre over the reigns of the first three Edwards, and to provide the starting-point for a consideration of W&W's own identity as a ‘complaint’ poem.

The previous chapters have emphasised that the immediate message of W&W relates not to the hardships of the lower orders but to the respon¬sibilities of the higher levels of society, and to the lesser landed classes or gentry in particular. Pace Harwood's thesis about the anxiety of the poet over the presumptuousness of the peasantry in the aftermath of the Black Death, we have observed that direct criticism of the lower orders is generally omitted from the text. Similarly, the representation of the merchant class is limited, and shies away from the stereotypes of contemporary literature that often present the commercial classes as unscrupulous profiteers and comi¬cal social climbers. Instead, there sit within the poem a series of grounded assumptions about a well-ordered society in which peasants and lords (not to mention clerics and merchants) understand their own positions in the grand scheme of things and are properly mindful of their resulting social obligations towards others.

At first sight, this decidedly conservative viewpoint seems at odds with some recent interpretations of the complaint literature of the period.

W&W has always tended to be viewed as expressing a tension between two different sub-orders of medieval society: on the one hand (exem¬plified in the figure of Wynnere) those who amassed wealth, assumed to represent the mercantile or wider ‘commercial’ classes; and on the other (in the person of Wastoure) those who spent all their resources in conspicuous consumption, usually regarded as members of the landed elite of nobles and gentry. Gollancz argued that ‘the rise of the new merchant class – the new rich, with all the power of wealth, is an outstanding feature of the poem, and perhaps the main point at issue’. His view has prevailed upon virtually every subsequent critic of the poem. As S. H. Rigby has recently shown, however, the strong emphasis in modern literary scholarship on ‘the rise of a “bourgeoisie” inhabiting a “new world” of money, trade, profit and eco¬nomic individualism’, and the implicit assumption of a tension between it and an ‘old world’ based on land and lordship, rest on a nineteenth-century, liberal-progressive view of the late Middle Ages and the idea that it was at this moment that the market became the primary agent of economic growth and social change. In recent generations, historical scholarship has tended to emphasise that the processes of urbanisation and commercialisation were well under way before the supposed ‘rise of the middle class’ in the four¬teenth century. And the same scholarship has been much more disposed to view the restructuring of society in the later Middle Ages not as the widen¬ing of a gulf between the urban and the rural but in terms of a fundamental shift in the socio-legal relationship between lords and peasants. The collapse of serfdom and the rise in the prosperity of tenant farmers and wage labour-ers after the Black Death created a social hierarchy that was more finely nuanced and more flexible than ever before, and generated unparalleled opportunities for social advancement – not simply through the redistribu¬tion of land but also through service in the Church, in government and in the law and through involvement in manufacturing, retailing and wholesale trade.

The underlying objective of this study has been to test, re-establish and extend the argument, first developed by Hulbert and later revived and extended by Lawton and Salter, that W&W is likely to have been written not in the early 1350s but at some point in the 1360s (or, as Salter would have it, still later). These arguments were based on close reading of some of the crucial ‘historical’ passages in the poem, which under closer scrutiny need not, as supposed by others, refer solely to a cluster of events and debates around the years 1352–3; in Salter's case, the dating relied on her explo¬ration of a heraldic motif linking the poem (as she argued) to the family circle of Sir John Wingfield, which opened up the possibility of a relatively remote composition date stretching into the 1380s and beyond. The present analysis has suggested some new frames of reference for the poem, arguing inter alia that an effective terminus a quo for the dating of the poem may now be set at the Garter feast of April 1358. As regards a terminus ante quem, this analysis agrees in principle with Trigg that the poem is unlikely to have been written much later than the death of Sir William Shareshull in 1370, not just because of the mention of the chief justice in the poem, but also because the whole political atmosphere of England changed so radically after the re-opening of the French war in 1369, culminating in the general state of outrage about a broken and corrupt regime expressed in the Good Parliament of 1376.

In particular, this study has demonstrated the significant number and range of possible referents within the poem to events and debates of the 1360s: the attitude of political society towards the Anglo-French diplomatic settlement of 1360; the controversies provoked by the making and unmak¬ing of the new sumptuary laws in 1363 and 1365; the manner of funding the king's peacetime regime as determined in the parliaments of 1362, 1365 and 1368; and the scandalous dismissal of the king's steward, Sir John atte Lee, in 1368.

1337–1453 The Hundred Years War.

1340 Edward III of England declares himself ‘king of France’.

1344 Arthurian Round Table at Windsor Castle.

1346 Edward III defeats the French at the battle of Crécy.

1346 English forces defeat the Scots at the battle of Neville's Cross and take prisoner their king, David II.

1346–7 English forces besiege the town of Calais and take it in 1347.

1348 Round of tournaments in England to celebrate the victories of 1346–7. Includes a tournament at Windsor in June 1348 at which the Order of the Garter was probably instituted.

1348–9 First outbreak of the Black Death in England; government passes the Ordinance of Labourers in spring 1349.

1349 First meeting of the Order of the Garter on St George's Day, 23 April.

1350 Sir William Shareshull becomes chief justice of the court of king's bench.

1351 First parliament since the outbreak of the plague; govern¬ment passes the Statute of Labourers and Statute of Provisors.

1352 Parliament grants three years of direct taxation in return for legislation on a range of economic affairs; passage of the Stat¬ute of Treasons.

1353 Sir William Shareshull heads the eyre of Cheshire.

1353 Great council grants the crown the wool subsidy in return for legislation establishing the wool staple in England. Statute of Praemunire.

1355–7 Black Prince's campaign through France, culminating in the victory at Poitiers in 1357, with John II of France taken prisoner.

1357 Treaty of Berwick with the Scots results in release of David II on payment of large ransom.

1358 St George's Day feast at Windsor mounted on an unprecedented scale as a sign of English dominance over France and Scotland.

1358 Second eyre of Cheshire, led by Sir William Shareshull.

1360 Treaty of Brétigny, followed by Treaty of Calais, make Edward III sovereign ruler of enlarged duchy of Aquitaine but require him to give up the title to the French throne; John II to be released from captivity on payment of a large ransom.

1361 Treaty of Calais accepted in parliament.

1361–2 Second outbreak of the Black Death in England. St Maurus’ Wind (1362). Sir William Shareshull retires as chief justice of king's bench (1361) but returns to service of the Black Prince in eyre of Denbigh (1362).

Note: The modern rendering of W&W offered here is based on the vari¬ous editions and translations itemised above, p. ix, and on my own independent interpretations. In places where the original is defective, Turville-Petre provides important hypothetical readings, generally adopted by Trigg and Ginsberg. I draw freely on the modern English versions provided by Gollancz and Millett. The former, however, stays so close to the original that it sometimes obscures meanings, and the suggested readings are not always secure; Millett is therefore a default, though I also deviate from her understanding in a few places (see, for example, the discussion of line 387 above, p. 68 and n. 21). No attempt has been made to preserve the allitera-tive style of the original, though some relatively archaic forms (for example, ‘laund’ at lines 49, 54 and 209 and ‘comely king’ at lines 86 and 199) are retained for their particular technical sense (in the former case: see p. 16) or their more general literary reverberation (in the latter: see p. 10, n. 28).

Here begins a treatise and a good short debate between Winner and Waster

Winner and Waster (W&W) is a Middle English poem written, most likely, during the third quarter of the fourteenth century. It survives in a single manuscript, London, British Library Additional MS 31042, one of the two miscellanies of texts made in the mid-fifteenth century by Robert Thornton, a gentleman of East Newton in the North Riding of Yorkshire. The extant text is divided into a prologue and three ‘fitts’, or sections, divided at suitable points where the performer (assuming it to be a social reading) might refill his wine-cup (lines 216–17, 366–7). Thornton's text of W&W is, however, incomplete. The poem breaks off after 503 lines at a hiatus in the manuscript; supposing that the original was longer (and it remains possible that Thornton was also working with an incomplete version), it is unclear what proportion is now lost. The text is also corrupt in places, and the final extant folio is badly damaged; the level of intervention in modern editions has varied greatly and the precise meaning of some passages remains uncertain.

The prologue to the poem represents a general complaint upon the unsettled times, in which the services of artful poets are no longer recog-nised as they once had been. In the first fitt, the narrator then tells of his journey into ‘the West’ where, in a delightful woodland setting, he fell asleep and dreamed the dream that follows. The scene is an opening within the woods, surrounded by earthworks. Armed men and others are gath¬ered in the groves to either side, and at the crest of the earthworks sits a pavilion adorned with the imagery of the Order of the Garter. A wild man (sometimes referred to as the first knight) stands nearby, bedecked in the heraldry of King Edward III. The king himself is revealed, seated in state within the pavilion and clothed in fantastic robes which themselves also bear the emblem of the garter. The king calls forth the finest knight (some¬ times referred to as the second knight, or herald) in his own entourage and instructs him to go amongst the assembled forces to find out the nature of the quarrel reported there, so that it can be brought to peaceful resolution.