Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and the Commercial Practices of Late Fourteenth-Century London

Craig E. Bertolet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409448426
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317168096
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As residents of fourteenth-century London, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve each day encountered aspects of commerce such as buying, selling, and worrying about being cheated. Many of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales address how pervasive the market had become in personal relationships. Gower's writings include praises of the concept of trade and worries that widespread fraud has harmed it. Hoccleve's poetry examines the difficulty of living in London on a slender salary while at the same time being subject to all the temptations a rich market can provide. Each writer finds that principal tensions in London focused on commerce - how it worked, who controlled it, how it was organized, and who was excluded from it. Reading literary texts through the lens of archival documents and the sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu, this book demonstrates how the practices of buying and selling in medieval London shaped the writings of Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve. Craig Bertolet constructs a framework that reads specific Canterbury tales and pilgrims associated with trade alongside Gower's Mirour de L'Omme and Confessio Amantis, and Hoccleve's Male Regle and Regiment of Princes. Together, these texts demonstrate how the inherent instability commerce produces also produces narratives about that commerce.

Chapter 1
The Commercial Polity

In his Mirour de l’Omme, Gower devotes roughly 1,500 lines to criticizing the behaviors of merchants, artisans, and traders. As many critics have shown, anti-mercantile criticisms are not unusual in medieval estates’ satire. Gower’s level of detail, though, in cataloging the various frauds in which different trades engage is unusual in its specificity and detail. In fact, his Mirour is remarkable for this extensive critique of the trades because Gower sees them forming a sociopolitical entity devoted entirely to commerce. The term I will use for what Gower describes in his critiques of London is “commercial polity,” and this is the term that I will use to refer to the sociopolitical entity that encompassed late medieval London. This polity has different concerns than does the church, the court, or the rural shires. Although his later poetry appears to expand on the ideas he introduces in the Mirour, Gower’s opinion of the commercial polity does not change throughout his career.

Gower constructs a vision of London’s commercial polity based on four practices established over time: the commodification of time and labor, the market as the dominant social space (whether real or imagined), a validation of economic competition in every pursuit, and the transformation of material capital into social capital. Each of these practices had a negative component: commodified labor led to fraudulent begging, a dominating market infected cultural aspects that should be immune to commerce, economic competition caused conflicts (even among those groups who should not be competing), and the equation of social worth with wealth disenfranchised the poor. While Chaucer and Hoccleve examined some of these aspects, Gower has the most comprehensive vision of how London’s commercial polity functioned in a way that was both enticing and destabilizing.

Fernand Braudel argues that Western cities became so dynamic in the High Middle Ages because, in the rivalry between state and city for political dominance, the cities usually won. In fact, most of the power centers in Western Europe from 1100–1300 were cities rather than courts (with some powerful courts located in cities, such as the court of the counts of Champagne headquartered in Troyes). Conversely, in other areas of the world, such as the Byzantine Empire, Persia, or East Asia, power was with the state. Post-Carolingian states receded in power and allowed the cities to dominate their immediate regions, paying to their overlords nominal obedience or none at all. Braudel documents this pattern mostly in Flanders and Northern Italy where the aristocracy and especially the Holy Roman Emperor was weak. Cities in these regions, such as Antwerp, Bruges, Florence, and Venice, became economic powerhouses and semi-independent city-states. Braudel does not list London as one of those city-states because Anglo-Norman England, by comparison with the Low Countries and Northern Italy, was an exceptionally centralized nation-state. Before 1300, no English city stood out against the English state and its king.1

However, London does gain significant power after 1300 and should be considered by then in the same rank with Antwerp (rather than with Florence or Venice) in its ability to dominate its surrounding boroughs and influence its ruler, much as the German cities of the period were beginning to do. London’s rise was helped externally by the commercial power of its Flemish trading partners and internally by the crisis of sovereignty developing from the declining years of Edward III in the 1370s and the troubled reign of his successor, Richard II. The Tudors would revitalize the monarchy a century later and create a centralized English nation-state. By that time, though, London could not be subsumed completely under a royal yoke. Caroline Barron writes that London’s success in its struggle for power was due to having “a measure of support from the Crown” and because its citizens developed the “economic infrastructure” of the city. In other words, they developed “the facilities that promoted the easy exchange of goods and attracted buyers and sellers to London.”2 This “infrastructure” and the weakness or complicity of the king made London a commercial polity, such as its continental models and competitors.

The surviving records of late medieval London document how its people created this commercial polity. These records also show a conflict between its own real and imagined state. Officially, the City is composed of guilds working together to keep civic order and promote London’s interests usually in competition with the powerful and often capricious royal government.3 London also competed with other English cities (such as Southampton, Boston, and York) for political and economic dominance. Guilds competed among themselves to gain or retain power in the City. Individuals competed with each other for sales, resources, and status.4

Within their walls, Londoners encouraged trade, empowered guilds to police it, and squashed any debate about it. How much of the creation of this space was done prior to the first commercial exchanges is unclear. How many of the codes that form the structure to this polity responded to abuse of this very space (and therefore were reactive rather than proactive) rather than actually devised this space is also unclear. What is certain, however, in the surviving records is that these practices become enshrined in civic codes over the course of the fourteenth and into the fifteenth century. These codes follow what Bourdieu identifies as the habitus.

According to Bourdieu, the habitus proceeds from the confection of group practices “without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor.”5 It is the accretion or the gradual development over time of behavioral patterns deemed acceptable by the populace. Guilds or the mayor may produce formal decrees, but these documents are usually a response to or a validation of the agreed-upon practices of the traders in the City. As such, London’s commercial habitus appears through common consent rather than as a series of commands from a dictating agent, such as the king or the mayor. Once established, these practices remain in place for generations because the habitus protects itself by being located in an environment of like-minded individuals. Anyone moving into London had to adopt its habitus or face legal and/or social exclusion. London’s governors constructed an apprenticeship system that trained potential citizens in how to practice their trade and how to be productive members of London’s society so that the polity could perpetuate itself without necessarily changing itself. This system ensured compliance to the general civic order, described in the surviving documents as “common profit.” Essentially, this common profit was an idealization of medieval London’s habitus. Similarly, London’s governors worked to ensure that outsiders did not disturb or seek to remake their society by keeping them at a distance or trying to assimilate them. Chaucer, Hoccleve, and especially Gower hold “common profit” as the glue keeping the polity together.

Braudel asserts that “[w]herever there are towns, there will also be a form of power, protective and coercive, whatever the shape taken by that power or the social group identified with it.”6 It was so in medieval London, mostly with its guilds. London law required that all guilds needed to police their own members so that “no falseness, nor false works, nor deceits be found in any manner from these mysteries for the honor of the good people of the mysteries and the common profit of the people.”7 Britnell states that town officials “assumed that individual crafts would conspire against the public interest. To bring the various crafts into harmony with each other, and thereby to promote the health of the whole body of a community, was accordingly one of the tasks of government.”8 These guilds establish and maintain power in London. All the City’s secular leaders tended to come from them. However, the guilds were composed of individuals, and individuals determine their own success or failure.

Those individuals may have considered themselves a different social class from those who labored in the fields because they would be, as Bourdieu says of social classes, “at the same time a class of biological individuals having the same habitus, understood as a system of dispositions common to all products of the same conditionings.”9 Their class was based on practices as well as birth and, as such, was different from the peasants whose social class was determined entirely by birth. For Gower, Chaucer, and Hoccleve, everyone who practices the habitus of London trade is a member of the same commercial social class. It is not just the itinerant merchant, but also the guildsman, artisan, apprentice, and innkeeper. A peasant could conceivably learn the practices of the commercial polity and move from field to market. However, this shift in class was not always welcome by those in London.

For instance, the influx of people from outside the City and especially outside the kingdom caused (often violent) reactions among the people of London, especially if these individuals were imagined to be taking away jobs from the native population. Gower, for one, distrusted Italians intensely. But Flemings tended to be the usual target of xenophobic violence by Londoners. Barron explains that the labor shortage following the Black Death in England encouraged Flemish workers to immigrate with their technologically advanced skills in weaving and cloth-making.10 Edward III may have had a hand in bringing Flemish weavers to English cities (especially to London) in his plan to strengthen England’s cloth industry.11 The Flemings largely were among the poorer and least powerful immigrants to the City. London’s mayors needed to issue periodic remonstrances against molesting them.12 In 1362/63, Mayor Stephen Cavendisshe issued a proclamation that “no Fleming, Brabanter, or ‘Selander’ carry arms or a knife, small or large, with a point, secretly or openly, under penalty of forfeiture.”13 The proclamation does not explain what caused this mass disarming. Perhaps it was a fear of a body of armed strangers wandering about London streets or was the response to an isolated incident. Later, in 1370, the Flemish and Brabanter weavers complained to the mayor that their servants would fight each other in two different churchyards “and make very great affray in the City.”14

The real concern about these aliens may or may not have been as great as the text seems to indicate. In any case, the 1362/63 proclamation made a group of immigrants vulnerable to their domestic competitors (who were permitted to bear arms in the City). The vulnerability of the Flemings and the deep-seated animosity that the native English of London had for them saw its worst manifestation in the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt when around 40 Flemings were dragged from sanctuary in the church of St. Martin’s, Vintry Ward (a few yards from Chaucer’s boyhood home) and butchered in the street, powerless to protect themselves against the mob.15

When someone broke one of the City’s commercial laws, such as through fraud, the mayor’s court would examine the defendant and pass sentence.16 Punishment needed to be public to demonstrate that the City could control threats to its commerce and general civic order. But this very act exposed the instability commerce brought to the City itself as noisy crowds rumbled through the streets disrupting the ordinary routine and drawing attention to someone who broke the rules. Moreover, in bringing charges, the guilds acknowledged that their members still broke their rules. Mark Addison Amos writes that the guilds had “daysmen” who would “investigate and arbitrate intraguild disputes. Such a system not only shutters internal problems from the public eye (and courts) to better present a unified and peaceable image of the guild to the city, but also keeps guildsmen from incurring the often-weighty costs of prosecuting or defending a case in the courts of the realm.”17 Of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Commercial Polity
• 2 Buying and Markets
• 3 Debts and Credit
• 4 Shopkeeping
• 5 Innkeepers and the Hospitality Trade
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index