5 Merchandising peace

Abstract

Near the end of his Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep, John Lydgate foregrounds the relationship between peace and prosperity, 'Wher pees restith ther is al weelfare'. 1 Lydgate wrote the Debate, about which of the three animals 'to man was most profitable' (28), after the duke of Burgundy's attack on Calais in 1436. Where both the goose and the horse describe themselves as serving the interests of war by providing feathers for arrows and transport for knights, the ram argues that the sheep serves the interests of peace and prosperity, a claim the horse counters by arguing that prosperity invites conquest. Ben Lowe has argued that the Debate contributes to the late medieval debate about the merits of peace in relation to the concept of the just war and that Lydgate, like John Gower in his Praise of Peace, sought to reverse the common affirmation of war as benefiting the common good. 2 However, Lydgate -who enjoyed remunerative relations with a variety of patrons from both crown and city -tempers his praise of peace with a final author's envoi. There, he urges moderation, reminding his readers that all stations are necessary, that the law of Nature ordains a place for each creature and, implicitly, for each argument. Rather than endorsing any single claim, Lydgate raises those issues pertinent to contemporary recommendations for peace that also appear in the works of Gower and Chaucer, as Lowe has indicated. In offering less an endorsement of peace than a construction of it in the Debate, Lydgate encapsulates a prolonged conversation about the relative merits of knight and merchant that is conterminous with the Hundred Years War. 3 Though the conversation neither begins with the war nor ceases with its effective end in 1453, late medieval vernacular literary texts