Bureaucratic Verse: William Lyndwood, the Privy Seal, and the Form of <i>The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye</i>

Sobecki, Sebastian

doi:10.1484/j.nml.1.102188

Cited by 5 publications

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“…Sebastian Sobecki has argued that the poem was composed within the private circle of Henry VI and uses the authority of Henry V to 'forge a set of lasting doctrines for his young successor'. 36 If the poem did emerge from the Privy Seal, its intertwining of the values of merchants and kings suggests the author's awareness of the need to offer England's merchants a view of themselves as maintaining the sea by their 'besinesse' (1106) and banishing war among 'brothers' joined by a highway of profit. It also serves as a reminder to the sovereign that in 'keeping' the sea, he enables the peace signified by merchandise.…”

Section: Figures and Sites Of Mobilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

5 Merchandising peace

Staley

2024

Literatures of the Hundred Years War

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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

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Section: Figures and Sites Of Mobilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

5 Merchandising peace

Staley

2024

Literatures of the Hundred Years War

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“…The second area in which the Libelle stands out if viewed through the prism of the law is its ingenious use of the petitionary form of the libellus, the technical term for the bill of complaint submitted to the Court of Admiralty. 14 The Libelle is an unusual variation on the theme that Matthew Giancarlo calls the 'bill-poem'. 15 Such poems embed themselves in the complaint tradition, usually invoking complaints made by individuals.…”

Section: Lancastrian Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Lancastrian Literature

Sobecki¹

2019

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature

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“…fellow workers) on sea and on land. (Thornton, 2001, 50)] Such accounts of Edgar's alleged rule over all the islands surrounding Britain, by virtue of controlling the seas, filtered into numerous chronicles and historiographies, from the Melrose chronicle to Aelred of Rievaulx's Genealogia regum Anglorum, until they eventually reached the fifteenth-century proto-mercantilist Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, a poem most likely associated with the highest ranks of Henry VI's government and, in particular, with William Lyndwood, Keeper of the Privy Seal, and one of medieval England's most formidable canon lawyers (Sobecki, 2011b). By the sixteenth century, with help from the Libelle, Dee, and Hakluyt, the Northeast Atlantic archipelago had become Edgar's archipelago, a distinctly English and imperial construct.…”

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confidence: 99%