The Peasants and the Great Revolt.
- Author/Editor
- Bailey, Mark.
- Title
- The Peasants and the Great Revolt.
- Published
- Bailey, Mark. "The Peasants and the Great Revolt." In Historians on John Gower. Ed. Stephen H. Rigby, with Siân Echard (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 167-90.
- Review
- Bailey describes the Black Death, Labor reforms, and the "Great Revolt of 1381," casting into relief the complexity of the traditional third estate and describing Gower's failure or unwillingness to acknowledge this complexity. The poet's works, Bailey shows, "convey little sense of engagement" with the "live issues" of "labour and poverty," expressing instead "nostalgia" for a lost golden age (182) and persistently lumping all laborers as pejorative "rustici" (172), "furious beasts" (184), or similar denigrations. Bailey explains the "chronic shortage of workers" and the "rising expectations and aspirations of lower orders," resulting from the national outbreaks of plague. Legal and political efforts to curb the mobility of workers and perceived idleness failed, generally, leading in intricate ways to the "varied and complex movement" (188) of the Uprising of 1381 which itself prompted a "debate that grappled with issues (such as justice and labour)" (190). Bailey charts opinions, actions, and reactions in parliamentary records, legal proceedings, and social commentaries, characterizing Gower's attitudes as reductive, with his depiction of the third estate in VC as "over-simplified and narrow" (187), although not unique. More generally, Bailey asserts, Gower was "a social conservative even by the standards of his own age," one who did not engage the "evolving debates on labour and poverty" (190). [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.1]
- Date
- 2019
- Gower Subjects
- Backgrounds and General Criticism
Vox Clamantis