Encountering <i>The Book of Margery Kempe</i>

Laura Kalas, Laura Varnam, Laura Kalas, Laura Varnam, David Matthews, Anke Bernau, James Paz

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781526146618
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526146601
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: Literature

This innovative critical volume brings the study of Margery Kempe into the twenty-first century. Structured around four categories of 'encounter' – textual, internal, external and performative – the volume offers a capacious exploration of The Book of Margery Kempe, characterised by multiple complementary and dissonant approaches. It employs a multiplicity of scholarly and critical lenses, including the intertextual history of medieval women's literary culture, medical humanities, history of science, digital humanities, literary criticism, oral history, the global Middle Ages, archival research and creative re-imagining. Revealing several new discoveries about Margery Kempe and her Book in its global contexts, and offering multiple ways of reading the Book in the modern world, it will be an essential companion for years to come.

III
Encountering the world

8
Margery Kempe's home town and worthy kin

Susan Maddock

It is a testament to the thoroughness of Sanford Brown Meech's trawl of records in King's Lynn for people mentioned in the Book that so little more was uncovered during the following three-quarters of a century.¹ A fresh encounter with the archival evidence was long overdue, not only to include manuscripts which were inaccessible to Meech² but also to provide a fuller context to the extracts published in 1940. The scope of research also required expansion socially, beyond the small number of burgesses who left the biggest imprint on Lynn's archival record, and geographically, to explore the connections and interests of Lynn families outside the town. As a result of this wider approach, a clearer picture is beginning to emerge of Margery Kempe's birth and marital families, her relationships with different status groups in her home town, and her encounters with other notable individuals such as Alan of Lynn.

John de Brunham's background and career

The Brunham name, combined with evidence that the family still owned land in the Burnham parishes of north Norfolk in the early fifteenth century, allows us to be confident that Margery Kempe's ancestors came from there, rather than one of several other Burnhams in England.³ The first Brunham at Lynn who can be definitively linked with Margery is her grandfather, Ralph. A burgess of Lynn before 1333 and probably by 1324, when he entered the merchant guild, he had several properties in the town, and was resident in Chequer ward by 1328.⁴ Records of borough administration are patchy for his lifetime, but Ralph's name appears in two lists of the borough's governing group of jurats, made in 1342 and 1349.⁵ He must have survived the Black Death, which swept through Lynn in summer 1349,⁶ because he was amerced for failing to attend the borough's leet court on 28 October that year, but does not appear in a tax assessment, 1357, suggesting he had died before then.⁷

Ralph's son, John (Margery Kempe's father), was probably born in the early 1330s. A merchant, like his father, he was admitted as a burgess of Lynn in 1353.⁸ A burgess, or freeman, was an inhabitant of the borough who had full civic rights: he – men only – could apply for admission by right of birth, by purchase, or after completing an apprenticeship to an existing burgess of Lynn, provided that burgess was a merchant. In the late fourteenth century, there were around 150 burgesses – fewer than 10 per cent of adult men in the town – and only around a quarter of them, all merchants, played a substantial part in running the town's affairs.

Figure 8.1 Late medieval Lynn.

Figure 8.2 People named Brunham recorded as living or working in Lynn between 1300 and 1440.

John de Brunham moved rapidly up the borough hierarchy: he was one of the four chamberlains – the borough's financial officers – in 1355–56, and twice more in the 1360s. Between 1365 and 1384 he represented Lynn in Parliament six times, and in 1370–1 he served the first of five annual terms as mayor (the others were in 1377–78, 1378–79, 1385–86 and 1391–92). Finally, from 1393 to at least 1402, he held the uniquely influential role, combining elements of governmental, religious, and financial authority, of alderman of the Holy Trinity merchant guild.⁹ As alderman he was not only the head of a spectacularly wealthy association of merchants and the town's premier religious guild; he was also second only to the mayor in the borough's governing elite. He died between 24 December 1412 and 16 October 1413: probably closer to the latter date, as ‘John Brunham of Lynne’ was named in a court of common pleas suit in June 1413.¹⁰

Margery's father also had a national profile which outranked his Lynn contemporaries. He was appointed to several commissions of array from 1377 (a year in which his own ship, the James, was on naval service) to 1399; and he was the only Lynn burgess in his lifetime to be appointed a justice of the peace for Norfolk, as well as for Lynn, bringing him into close contact with the county's aristocracy and gentry.¹¹ In 1383, wearied by the extent of work he was asked to do for the Crown, he obtained an exemption from being compelled to serve ‘at the supplication of the king's sister, the duchess of Brittany’: Joan Holland, Richard II's half-sister, and second wife of the fourth John, duke of Brittany.¹² The king had let the duke have the Castle Rising estate, 8 kilometres from Lynn, and the duke and duchess first stayed at the castle in 1378, during John de Brunham's second mayoralty.¹³ The borough always sent gifts on such occasions: in 1378, six cartloads of wine, wax, sturgeon, oats, and herring (some supplied by Brunham himself) were sent up the road to Castle Rising.¹⁴ As mayor John would have met the duchess in 1378, and doubtless on other occasions, too.

The last year or two of John de Brunham's life must have been blighted by the ‘contentions, rumours, disagreements, disputes, dissensions and controversies’ which dominated the borough's political life in the early fifteenth century, especially between 1411 and 1416.¹⁵ In company with the mayors who served from 1399 to 1406 – Edmund Belleyeter (John de Brunham's former apprentice), John Wentworth, Robert Botekesham, and Thomas Waterden – he was accused of excessive and unauthorised expenditure: in particular, on a costly legal campaign against Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich and the town's lord, in the years before Despenser's death in 1406. This centred on the bishop's alleged failure to maintain his quay at the mouth of the Purfleet, rendering the port unsafe for ships and the town vulnerable to flooding, but also cited maladministration by the bishop's officers, and questioned the legal basis of the bishop's secular jurisdiction in Lynn.¹⁶ Brunham was described in the context of the disputed expenses as a former mayor, but in reality it must have been his role as alderman which was under scrutiny. The five were also accused more generally of ‘wrongs, oppressions, injustices, exactions, extortions, evils, and vexations’.¹⁷

We do not have John de Brunham's testament, although we kno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Notes on contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe in the twenty-first century
• I Textual encounters
• II Internal encounters
• III Encountering the world
• IV Performative encounters
• Select bibliography
• Index