The Hidden Mysteries at the Intersection Between Medieval Law and Literature
Candace Barrington and Sebastian Sobecki, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature. 220pp, 6X9”, paperback. ISBN: 978-1-316-63234-5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
*****
From my undergraduate through my graduate studies the most helpful books for my literary research projects have tended to be one of these Cambridge companions. Somehow Cambridge can compress an incredible volume of useful information into these relatively short books that help researchers understand the multiple dimensions of a given topic. I tend to be inspired with ideas for directions of unexplored research byways, or to find solutions to vague problems that appeared incomprehensible before I began reviewing the contents of these particular companions. Thus, it would have been a great disappointment to me personally if I learned upon closer examination or in retrospect that there was something wrong with these compressed knowledge-factories. Happily, looking over this book confirms my life-long belief in this brand. It does indeed provide treasures about one of the most difficult to analyze (due to a lack of surviving evidence) literary periods: the Medieval age.
The blurb summarizes this companion as an “accessible introduction to this rich engagement in medieval and early Tudor England.” As my own research has moved backwards across England’s history from the nineteenth century to the sixteenth, I have come to appreciate the increasing significance of the law in the literary output. My findings regarding ghostwriting in Elizabethan England indicate that most of the texts published in this age were composed, edited and printed by approved propagandists; censorship of the press did not mean screening out merely outwardly rebellious or immoral texts, but rather all unsponsored-by-aristocracy texts and ideas; this allowed the government to retain a stranglehold on the people: such undemocratic publishing was necessary in an age when most people were on the edge of starvation, slavery and colonialism were enriching a handful while killing millions, and overall the policies of the monarchy in no way reflected the interests of the public who might have access to reading any texts that could be printed at a cost within their budgets. Thus, understanding the intersection between the law and the literature produced in these earlier times explains not only what the fictional characters are doing and why, but what the monarchy and its government were doing behind the publishing scenes to assure favorable publicity; this being just one among other revealing law-literature overlaps. This book is an overview of “medieval law with concise examples illustrating how the law infiltrated literary texts during this period. Foundational chapters written by leading specialists in legal history prepare readers to be guided by noted literary scholars through unexpected conversations with the law found in numerous medieval texts, including major works by Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and Malory. Part I contains detailed introductions to legal concepts, practices and institutions in medieval England, and Part II covers medieval texts and authors whose verse and prose can be understood as engaging with the law.”
The genres or types of texts that have survived from these ages are very foreign to modern audiences. Modern computing and digital printing makes it easy to digress on topics, but brevity was prized in the pre-press era. The chapter on “Treatises, Tracts and Compilations” is useful to those who are reviewing these types of documents as part of their research and are bewildered by their characteristics without some translation. This would be the case if a scholar was commencing modern legal research and did not understand the difference between law codes and legal case history. Many of the best early authors (i.e. Sir Walter Scott and Robert Paltock) I have been researching were lawyers because the law was a field that required comprehension and application of some of the most complex texts available; monarchs controlled the populace through the laws described in these codes, and they were deliberately complex to keep the public from being able to defend itself against unjust prosecution. Being aware of the laws could, for example, migrate somebody seeking a “legal remedy” from “seignorial and communal courts… to the king’s courts at Westminster and to county courts… One could thus avert archaic legal procedures, such as trial by battle in feudal disputes.” The courts grew in power as those in the legal profession increasingly collected fees for their services. Poorer members of the legal profession had to seek fee-based employment as clerks or other minor players without an expensive advanced education, while the rich could buy judicial offices. Curiously Don C. Skemer offers an example of the “first authoritative common law treatise” which has been attributed to Ganulf Glanvill, The Treatise on the Laws…, but adds that the works true author was more likely to be a more minor “contemporary judge or higher-level clerk” (66-7). In other words, the system of clerks writing most of the judges’ rulings we have today has been around since at least these medieval times.
Just another example of the insightful information offered in these pages is the example of a Latin “formulaic close rolls entry of Cecily Chaumpaigne’s 1380 agreement to release ‘Galfrido Chaucer from all charges related to ‘de raptu meo’”, which was only discovered in the nineteenth century, and scholars remained uncertain for a century if the accusation was for abduction, rape, both or something else; the claim was that the Latin phrases were confusing, but Candace Barrington argues the real problem appears to be a hesitancy in the literary establishment to call England’s greatest medieval poet a “rapist”, which stalled this fact from being publicized as such. Barrington explains that women “under assault” had extremely “limited legal options” in this period, and so this woman would have been forced with withdraw rather than choosing to do so (137). This explanation is the reason legal scholarship is necessary to decipher some of literature’s enduring “mysteries”. For example, I have been attempting to publish my findings regarding who really wrote “Defoe” and “Shakespeare”, but just as accusing these authors of “rape” would be suppressed, so is the accusation of ghostwriting and mis-attributions by the literary establishment. Such matters really should be handled as cold legal cases rather than as subjective topics that can be philosophically addressed. Philosophy can favor fictitious fantasy about the lives of writers, whereas the legal documents can reveal the factual truths regarding whoever they were and whatever wrongs they committed.
Everybody who is studying either medieval law or literature can be enriched by reading this book. Libraries should definitely carry it because Medieval times are not as removed from our own times as we like to imagine: we are still repeating many of the mistakes made in this age, and reading books like this might help us stop doing so.