Authors: Bruce Holsinger
A Burnable Book (40 page)
O
ne of the strange pleasures of writing
A Burnable Book
has been the discovery and partial correction of my own ignorance about much of medieval life. After half a career spent studying and teaching the literature of the Middle Ages, I found it something of a surprise to realize I couldn’t answer a simple question posed by my younger son: “Did they have forks?” (Yes, Malcolm, after a fashion, though not many of them, and mostly for serving, not eating.) Though I have drawn on many of the same sorts of sources I regularly consult in my academic work, fiction requires a more eclectic approach to research guided by the idiosyncrasies of story and character. As often as I have read around in the latest scholarship on aristocratic politics during the reign of Richard II, I have found myself consulting the work of nineteenth-century antiquarians on gutters and drainage in the Southwark stews.
I hope this note will guide readers in following up on any aspects of the historical setting that interest them, as well as help answer questions about the specific choices I have made in depicting a medieval world so familiar yet so foreign to our own. Readers will find occasional posts about setting and sources on my blog, www.burnablebooks.com, and I am happy to receive queries and corrections as they arise.
John Gower’s London was three cities, not one, and much of its life and culture was shaped by the distinctive character of the two smaller suburbs lying outside the walled city itself (and beyond its jurisdiction). The history of London, Southwark, and Westminster in the decades following the Black Death has been the subject of considerable scholarship in recent years that has helped me flesh out the bones of a story set in a richly complex milieu. The works of urban history I have consulted most frequently include Caroline Barron’s
London in the Later Middle Ages,
a magisterial study of the medieval city, its institutions, and its diverse population; Sheila Lindenbaum’s numerous articles on everything from urban festivals to aristocratic tournaments; Robert Shepherd’s
Westminster: A Biography,
with its rich appreciation for the historical contours and character of the royal city; Martha Carlin’s
Medieval Southwark,
a thorough guide to the intricacies of life and politics in the small suburb across the bridge, where bishops and butchers, tanners and taverners lived side by side and elbowed for room; Barbara Hanawalt’s
Growing Up in Medieval London,
with its inspiring re-creations of individual lives of the young; the myth-busting scholarship of Judith Bennett, Marjorie McIntosh, Cordelia Beattie, Kim Phillips, and others on the lives, careers, and literacies of medieval singlewomen; the work of urban archaeologists on Winchester Palace, the customhouse near Billingsgate, and other medieval sites; and Frank Rexroth’s
Deviance and Power in Late Medieval London,
a field guide of sorts to the underworld of urban grime and petty crime that surrounded Gower, Chaucer, and the other city dwellers populating this story. I have also benefited from new work by Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs on the scribal culture of the London Guildhall, home to an urban bureaucracy that included the likes of Ralph Strode and Adam Pinkhurst—the latter perhaps Geoffrey Chaucer’s most notable scribe. (The map included at the beginning of the book is based in part on the map of late-medieval London included in Mooney and Stubbs’s
Scribes and the City,
enhanced by the renderings in Carlin’s
Medieval Southwark
and the wonderfully detailed maps created for the third volume of the British Atlas of Historic Towns.)
Other bureaucracies are also part of the story told in
A Burnable Book,
particularly the legal profession emerging during these years and the peculiar educational system that trained its members. The origins of the Inns of Court in the final decades of the fourteenth century are shrouded in obscurity. While the Inner and Middle Temples were organized well before 1385, the earliest written records from any of the four inns come from the 1420s; the exact nature of legal education and barrister culture in the fourteenth century is thus a matter of pure speculation (hence the raucous spectacle performed by the apprentices at Temple Hall, invented for this book). We do know something about the various personnel who defined the changing profession. The character of Thomas Pinchbeak, serjeant-at-law, is based on a real member of the Order of the Coif. The history of the order has been treated in great depth by J. H. Baker, whose many works have helped define the study of medieval English law and its institutions.
As one of my early readers helped me see,
A Burnable Book
is in part a story of town-crown conflict, with the novel’s largely London-based narrative playing out against the political crisis that more broadly defined this period of English history. The year 1385 was a pivotal one for the nation’s aristocratic classes, with the expiration in May of a truce with France, Scottish incursions along the northern border, and rising tensions between the uppermost factions in the realm. Just months after the events portrayed here, King Richard would create a number of new dukedoms and earldoms: John of Gaunt’s brothers would become dukes, Michael de la Pole the earl of Suffolk, and Robert de Vere the duke of Ireland. While the machinations of magnates are only a small part of this story, they are an important backdrop to the intrigue surrounding the book sought by Gower and others, and a domestic counterpart to equally pressing international affairs. Here I am indebted to studies of Richard II’s reign by Nigel Saul, Chris Given-Wilson, Michael Bennett, and Anthony Goodman; to Jonathan Sumption’s stirring history of the Hundred Years War, particularly his comments on the importance of spies; to biographies of the mercenary Sir John Hawkwood by William Caferro and Stephen Cooper; to Paul Strohm’s many studies of literary culture and court politics; to books by W. H. Ormrod and Stephanie Trigg on the Order of the Garter; and to Alison Weir’s
Mistress of the Monarchy,
a luminous reevaluation of Katherine Swynford.
The character of Eleanor/Edgar Rykener was inspired by an extraordinary document discovered by Sheila Lindenbaum in the Corporation of London Records Office. The document, subsequently transcribed and translated by David Lorenzo Boyd and Ruth Mazo Karras, was published in the first volume of the
Gay and Lesbian Quarterly
as “The Interrogation of a Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-Century London.” The work of Ruth Karras on medieval prostitution and the lives of those who practiced it has been immensely helpful to me in imagining the denizens and cultures of Gropecunt Lane and Rose Alley, as has Carolyn Dinshaw’s scholarship on medieval sexualities and gender.
Though the labors of modern scholars are an invaluable resource to any writer of historical fiction, they are no substitute for the primary sources in which medieval people speak to us in something like their own voices. I have consulted a wealth of sources attesting to the lives of the women and men of this era, always with an eye for unusual details. Coroners’ rolls and bishops’ registers, law cases and legal moots, memorandum books and conduct manuals: in these documents can be found the makings of countless medieval life stories whose contours appear only dimly to our modern eyes. Sources such as parish registers and household accounts have furnished given names and surnames (some of which I have altered for literary effect), while probate inventories, wills, and household account books show us glimpses of the objects, commodities, and habits that shaped the material world of late-medieval England. Readers wanting a taste of medieval London’s documentary record for themselves might enjoy paging through the hundreds of examples collected and translated in Henry Thomas Riley’s
Memorials of London and London Life in the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Centuries
or the
Liber Albus,
an immense compilation of rules and customs relating to city governance compiled in the early fifteenth century (both are freely available online). For a general guide to daily life and customs in the period, readers can do no better than Ian Mortimer’s
Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England
.
I have also consulted the writings of monastic and lay chroniclers of these fascinating years. The Westminster Chronicle details the tensions between John of Gaunt and King Richard over the first half of 1385, as well as contemporaneous events in Italy surrounding the Visconti and Sir John Hawkwood. The metrical chronicle of the Chandos Herald recounts the 1367 campaign of Edward the Black Prince in Castile and Aragon in the months surrounding the Battle of Nájera, providing the tragic background to the story of Seguina d’Orange.
The literature of medieval England, my own scholarly specialty, has been a constant source of reference, dialogue, and slang; readers familiar with the writings of Chaucer, Gower, William Langland, and others will find allusions and borrowings on nearly every page. The prophecies of the
De Mortibus Regum Anglorum
are modeled on the alliterative long lines of Langland and the Pearl poet. In addition to literary texts, innumerable historical and documentary sources are excerpted in the
Middle English Dictionary
and its compendium. As I always advise my students, the
MED
is far superior to the
OED
for anyone interested in early English wordings, first usages, and forms of address. (As the
MED
demonstrates, for example, words and phrases such as “my lord” and “sire” were ubiquitous in the period and used even within the household, despite the common assumption that they were reserved for aristocrats and kings.)
Finally, John Gower. Despite his prolific career, his adept use of three distinctive literary languages, and his featured role in Shakespeare’s
Pericles,
Gower has always suffered by comparison to his more illustrious contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer. Yet the two poets were close and perhaps lifelong friends. We know about this friendship from several documentary sources, including one granting Gower power of attorney for the duration of Chaucer’s 1378 trip to Italy (the later trip imagined here is my own invention). There are also several moments in which the two poets speak to each other within the lines of their verse. One of these, an apostrophe addressed by Chaucer to “Moral Gower” near the end of
Troilus and Criseyde,
has largely shaped the critical perception of Gower’s character.
The protagonist of
A Burnable Book
is a more . . . let’s say,
compromised
Gower. In exploring the darker sides of his character, his family, and his friendships, I have been guided above all by the poet’s own writing: by the bleak, even nihilistic tone one often finds him adopting toward the many subjects he treats. For particular details of Gower’s life and circumstances (including the encounter along the Thames with King Richard, based on the highly stylized account in the
Confessio Amantis
), I have relied on the scholarship of Robert F. Yeager, Derek Pearsall, Candace Barrington, John M. Bowers, Andrew Galloway, Jonathan Hsy, and Diane Watt, whose work sparked some of my initial thinking about the poet’s shadier side. If the John Gower imagined here strikes specialists as untenable or overdone, I hope they will attribute this in part to the poet’s own sense of our collective estrangement from the ever-changing world around us. As Gower puts it near the end of his greatest work, “I know not how the world is went.”
G. K. Chesterton once called Geoffrey Chaucer a “poet of gratitude,” a writer “positively full of warm acknowledgment.” Of all the poet’s qualities, this is perhaps the easiest to imitate. Over the years I have accumulated many debts to friends, colleagues, and correspondents who have lent support of various kinds, from careful readings to open ears and ready pints. They include Linda Blackford, Carol Blount, Heather Blurton, Andrew Cole, Edward Dusinberre, Mark Edmundson, Katherine Eggert, Dyan Elliot, David Gies, Jennifer Hershey, Jen Jahner, William Kuskin, Jana Mathews, Deborah McGrady, Christian McMillen, Howard Morhaim, John Parker, John Pepper, Caroline Preston, Patrick Pritchett, Myra Seaman, Lisa Russ Spaar, Emily Steiner, Beth Sutherland, John Stevenson, Michael Suarez, Christopher Tilghman, Cynthia Wall, and Mark Winokur.
Paul Fox, chairman of the Heraldry Society, advised me on some of the finer points of royal heraldry in the Edwardian and Ricardian Age. Amy Appleford shared her knowledge of burial practices for the poor of London. Paul Strohm, formerly the J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of Medieval Studies at Oxford and an endless reserve of knowledge about medieval London and its culture, read the manuscript in an early draft and made numerous suggestions about setting, chronology, and historical detail. Andrew Galloway and Claire Waters read the book meticulously and with careful attention to details of idiom and language.
As a teacher of medieval culture I am also indebted to the scholars whose formative teaching exposed me to the wonders of the medieval world—its history, its literature, its music, its theology, and its art. Thanks to Teodolinda Barolini, Christopher Baswell, Marvin Becker, Caroline Walker Bynum, Rita Copeland, Consuelo Dutschke, Joan Ferrante, Carmela Franklin, Barbara Hanawalt, Robert Hanning, Ron Martinez, Linda Neagley, Susan Noakes, and David Wallace.
The editorial teams at HarperCollins UK and William Morrow have shepherded this book through the complex and exciting process from contract to publication. I am deeply indebted to Julia Wisdom and Rachel Kahan, who acquired
A Burnable Book
and saw it through revisions and production, for their wisdom, support, and patience. Thanks also go to Emad Akhtar, Ben Bruton, Trish Daly, Jaime Frost, Tavia Kowalchuk, Ashley Marudas, Rachel Meyers, Anne O’Brien, Aja Pollock, and Kate Stephenson.
My marvelous agent, Helen Heller, plucked a manuscript out of her slush pile and took a chance on an unproven writer of turgid academic prose. She read multiple drafts of this book with her unique blend of patience and severity. Her support, dedication, and pep talks have meant the world to me (as have her unflinching critiques).
My parents, Sheila and Harry Holsinger, deserve endless gratitude for the selfless support they have given me over a lifetime; as do Carol Holsinger, Eric Holsinger, and Anna Jullien, my siblings, for their constancy and love; Betsy and Bob Brickhouse, my in-laws, for their warm friendship and encouragement; and Campbell and Malcolm, my sons, for all the joy, energy, and soccer. The dedication reflects in a small way what this book owes to Anna Brickhouse, whose love and brilliance inspire its every word.