Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

wary of surrendering clerical prerogative or crossing lines between anticler-
ical commonplace and Lollardy or Lutheranism.^3 And the poet who reads
clerical authority and jurisdictional boundaries so alertly from within the
sanctuary of Westminster, in the teeth of the disputes over sanctuary
between Wolsey and Abbot John Islip, is also a past master in the pleasures
of transgression, whether they involve hawks defecating on the church altar
of Diss (Ware the Hauke) or Philip Sparrow’s“nomadic”perambulations
over the body of Jane Scrope.^4
InSpeke Parott, Skeltonatoposauthors a complex enfolding of prophecy,
love-complaint, academic satire, travel writing and multiple other textual
kinds. These either evade hierarchy and order, or allow it into the poem in
the inevitably violent form of Cardinal Wolsey. Parrot’s paradisal origins in
the realm of the marvelous and his linguistic facility generate a desire which
pulls in other genres, but which also throws into relief their limits, so that
the poem unfolds in multiple, superimposed temporalities. In so doing it
also complicates the imagining of“the court,”since one of its deepest
currents is urban and mercantile. InThe Garlande of Laurell,first printed
in 1523 , similar tactics delve into a different archive–autobiographical,
autobibliographical–under the sign of another marvelous bird. In the top
of the“goodly laurell tre”( 665 ) at the poem’s center roosts the“byrde of
Araby / Men call a phenix”( 667 – 68 ). This avianfigure of self-generating
poetic prowess is, like Parott, ensconced in a specifically female space: as
“men”have sent Parott from“Ynde”to“greate ladyes of estate”( 6 ), so in
The GarlandeSkelton is led to“a goodly chaumber of astate”where a
countess sits enthroned ( 768 ). From the nests of these bowers, Skelton’s
poems range across history, mythology, language and genre, powered by a
desire that overcomes place but is compelled in the end to concede limit.

cardinal oppositions

The risks of using Skelton to conceptualize a categorically defined“court”
poetry, as against a variety of interlocking urban subcultures, are already
visible in the textual witnesses ofSpeke Parott.^5 The version printed by
current Skelton editors is a composite; while lines 58 – 224 are drawn from
later printed editions, the one witness from Skelton’s lifetime– which
contains lines 1 – 57 and 238 – 513 – is BL MS Harley 2252 , the commonplace
book of the London mercer John Colyns. Ulrich Frost, on palaeographic
grounds, raises the tantalizing possibility that“Colyns’s exemplar may have
been a holograph manuscript of Skelton’s circulating in London.”^6 Not the
least striking feature ofSpeke Parottis that itflaunts the heterogeneity that

146 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland