A Southwark Tale: Gower, the 1381 Poll Tax, and Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales."

Author/Editor
Sobecki, Sebastian.

Title
A Southwark Tale: Gower, the 1381 Poll Tax, and Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales."

Published
Sobecki, Sebastian. "A Southwark Tale: Gower, the 1381 Poll Tax, and Chaucer's 'The Canterbury Tales'." Speculum 92 (2017): 630-60.

Review
The question of Gower's legal training and practice is Sobecki's point of departure, from which he challenges long-held assumptions about the nature of Gower's early relationship with Chaucer and lays groundwork for substantial new ideas about Chaucer's life and literary activities in Southwark, the original audience of the "Canterbury Tales," and the inspiration for the "General Prologue." That Chaucer wrote for a "Southwark audience," (645) and that the GP is modeled (at least in part) on the historical "Harry Bailey's check-roll of the poll tax reassessment of 1381" (653) are significant claims, but I focus here on Sobecki's concerns with Gower, particularly his argument that Gower was a trained, practicing lawyer. Anchoring this argument about Gower's legal standing, Sobecki revisits the Septvauns affair in 1365-69, from which he deduces that Gower may have "worked at the Court of Chancery" (640) at the time, leaving the nature of that work unspecified as indeed it must be since we know little of the early history of the legal procedures of the nascent institution. As others have done before, Sobecki cites (and reproduces) the fifteenth-century miniature from the 1460s that depicts the Court of Chancery, assuming it to be evidence of legal garb in the previous century. The miniature serves as backdrop to Sobecki's interpretation of the reference to striped sleeves in "Mirour de l'Omme" (21.772-75), reading the reference as feigned deference to legal hierarchies. Saying he wore only "la raye mance" ("striped sleeves"--not the red and blue of the cleric), the narrator of MO "inserts his status" as secular lawyer, Sobecki maintains, "into a professional hierarchy that places the canon law at its pinnacle," an example of "the paradoxical idiom of aspirational humility, so common in retractions and other medieval instances of simulated deference." That the "compliment [to clerical canon lawyers] . . . is feigned" is "confirmed" by the narrator's insistence that he knows "little Latin and little French" in the midst of a French poem of "almost twenty-five thousand lines" (633). These claims, it seems to me, beg stronger engagement with questions of the relation between Gower and his narrator, which Sobecki touches upon only lightly, and he only nods at the fact that other professionals wore striped garb. Similarly, he supports his claim that "gowns matter to Gower" (634), with two comments where, again, the narrator of MO "bewails the abuse of professional robes" when speaking of "those who wear the garb of law" (635). Offering additional, "circumstantial evidence" to associate Gower and his works with the Court of Chancery," Sobecki continues, more certain than most scholars on this topic: "I would argue that Gower was not only a trained lawyer, but . . . was also linked to Chancery and . . . to the court's developing equity side, in particular" (635-36). He then offers "new evidence" for his claim: four "previously unknown legal documents from the Court of Common pleas" (636) dating from 1396 and 1399 that refer to Gower. Three of them record that, in actions related to debts owed him, Gower sued "in propria persona," a phrase "used when someone appeared in court in person" (636), that is, without a representing attorney; the fourth shows that in one of these actions Gower used an unnamed attorney temporarily, to whom he paid (or intended to pay) one pound. Sobecki does not demonstrate--and nowhere claims--that only trained lawyers appeared "in propria persona" in late-medieval England, so it seems to me that the new documents, valuable as they are on their own as newly discovered life records, do not evince that formal legal training was necessary for Gower to present his own pleas. Our knowledge about such training and practice at the time is limited, as are details about the relations among legal training, bureaucratic clerking, and similar activities in the Chancery and elsewhere. Furthermore, there are at least six other known documents (five also from the Court of Common Pleas) in which an attorney appears for Gower (see pp. 11-12 and 17-18 of Martha Carlin's "Chronology of John Gower's Life Records" in Rigby and Echard's Historians on Gower, 2019); so, if nothing else, a lawyer represented him more often than he represented himself. Sobecki significantly expands the base of evidence that Gower had experience with several sorts of legal proceedings, but the jury is still out, so to speak, on whether or not he can be, or should be, considered a career lawyer. [MA. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 39.2]

Date
2017

Gower Subjects
Biography of Gower
Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis)