Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

Then who would ascribe, except he were a foole,

The pleasaunt laurer vnto the mourning cowle. (Prol. 4 : 103 – 12 )

The black habit is set against the living green of the laurel wreath, in a thrust
directed perhaps against Skelton, perhaps more generally against the rhet-
oricians who had found court favor under Henry VII and retained it under
his successor. This is not the death of the author so much as the author as
death, afigure whose boundary-haunting here takes on an uncanny quality.^30
Barclay’sEcloguesare among much else a curiously neglected resource in
the current critical fascination with nation and region. From the depths of
pastoral convention, Barclay produces an“authentic”England, dialectically
related to yet distinct from a larger national frame, inhabited by benign clerical
deities. His monastic identity is here suffused with a fantasy of England as
local being, and in this creation of a stable point of discursive origin, he gives a
new dimension to late-medieval writing on the court. However, the combi-
nation of clerical discourse and courtly address marks a synthesis that Barclay,
and history, were not to sustain, as the little known about his subsequent
career suggests. A letter sent to Wolsey by the informer Hermann Rinck from
Cologne, dated October 4 , 1528 , links Barclay with Tyndale and the evangel-
ical pamphleteers Jerome Barlowe and William Roy (“formerly Observants of
the order of St. Francis, but now Apostates”).^31 The next year another
informer, John West, speaks of“brother Alysander Barkley, who has called
Wolsey a tyrant and other opprobrious and blasphemous words.”^32 The next
surviving information puts Barclay once again at the political and geographical
margins: in 1538 he was moving around Devon and Cornwall, fomenting
dissent and speaking against the royal supremacy. He was ultimately to
become one of Mary Tudor’s chaplains before her accession, and thus
“involved in conflict with the government almost until his death in June
1552 .”^33 TheEclogues, with their stylized depiction–and partial production–
of the tensions between an English political center and monastic margins,
clearly held in check forces that could not long survive history’s entropic pull.

empire through the looking-glass

Douglas’sPalice of Honourcertainly shares Barclay’s uneasy view of the
imagined court, not least in its preoccupation with corporeal integrity.
While Barclay’s courtiers relive the press of courtly bodies in infernal
dreams, the fears in Douglas’s poem take on imaginative life in a dream
vision, through a series of courts–some static, some peripatetic–that he
passes through, or that pass him by. These fears, too, are of metamorphosis,
and are bound up with the dream’s deep involvement in the tropology offin

98 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland