Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

In creating a pastoral space defined against court and city, Barclay is
building on earlier formulations of his clerical identity. InThe Ship of Fools,
he connects the metropolis with local margins through the insertion of
anecdotes about his life and place in Devonshire, such as his caustic addition
of the secondaries of his collegiate church to the fools“that nought can and
nought wyll lerne”( 332 ) and the inclusion, under the rubric,“The description
of a wyse man,”of reference to“his frende bysshop by name”( 780 , 13 – 14 ).
Such interpolations thicken the geographical texture, giving Barclay a place
(topos) of a very precise kind. That place spreads into the semifictive Ely that is
his equivalent to his source’s“creation” of the semiallegorical landscape
around Mantua, with its city of Coitus (Coito) and its tower of sulphur
(Solferino).^17 Barclay’s identity is rooted in a rather more reassuring scenery, a
clerical imaginary whose repertory offigures supplies his discursive position
with affective support, and so with authority. Barclay’s rural Ely is very much
a textual world, one that seems to ask for exegesis, generated from the
contingencies of translation, amplification of sources, interstitial allusions
and the domestication of characters and places. Out of this, Barclay builds
on the nostalgic and elegiac element in pastoral, producing a terrain shaped by
a heavily masculine, quite literally patriarchal narrative of heroic discipline,
desire, loss and sheep.
Barclay’s transhistorical community brings deadauctorestogether with
modern prelates. This is nowhere more apparent than in the memorable
lament for John Alcock, bishop of Ely and founder of Jesus College,
Cambridge, who had died in 1500. Indeed, Alcock is here one of a trio of
dead clerics, set between Archbishop Morton of Canterbury, already
described as “the patron of thinges pastorall” ( 1 : 511 ) and Roger
Westminster, Ely’s prior until 1500. The lines on Alcock,“father of thinges
pastorall”( 1 : 531 ), collect several components:

My harte sore mourneth when I must specify

Of the gentle Cocke whiche sange so mirily,

He and hisflocke were like an vnion,

Conioyned in one without discention,

All the fayre Cockes which in his dayes crewe

When death him touched did his departing rewe,

The pretie palace by him made in the fen,

The maides, widowes, the wiues and the men,

With deadly dolour were pearsed to the heart

When death constrayned this shepheard to depart.

Corne, grasse andfieldes mourned for wo and payne,

For oft his prayer for them obtayned rayne,

The pleasauntfloures for wo faded eche one

92 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland