old”after Gideon’s victory. If the reference to sanctuary (“assilum,” 124 )
points to Heshbon as the Church, a common reading, the next lines render
the city literal and a site of substitutions:
Esebon, Marybon, Wheston next Barnet;
A trym-tram for an horse myll it were a nyse thyng,
Deyntes for dammoysels, chaffer far-fet... ( 126 – 28 )Characteristically, the hinge of an internal rhyme translates the biblical
prototype into London, then pushes it northwards.^30 Wolsey’s expansionism
is transmuting the city as sacred space; sanctuaries and nunneries are traded
for“trym-trams,”“chaffer far-fet.”Once again, Wolsey, the agent of con-
version and commutation, is converting ritual space to his own ends. Yet this
commutation happens in Parott-speech; the means by which Wolsey trans-
forms Esebon to Marybon is aural. It is Parrott’s mode of using language that
enacts Wolsey’s alteration, and through this the likeness between the two is
emphasized. Wolsey is making visible a logic which, as Lavezzo has superbly
argued, underscores similarities between two alien creatures, the paradisal
Parott and Wolsey the embodiment of“Rome in England.”It also, however,
brings to sight another kind ofauxesisby which the economics of Wolsey’s
dissolution of several houses is grasped through both the Antichrist’sseizure
of sacred ground and Parott’s own magical properties.
Like Parott himself, then, Wolsey, the great encroacher, is at once inter-
preter and vehicle of sacral history. His touch strikes everything with a deadly
literalism.“Aurea lyngua Greca,”like the poet’saurea fama, should be“mag-
nyfyed”( 142 ), but distinctions have been lost in the so-called Grammarians’
War, the collision between pedagogies ofpreceptandimitation sponsored, in
Skelton’s reading, by Wolsey’s endowment of thefirst chair in Greek at
Oxford.^31 The result is a carnival in which Latin mingles promiscuously
with the vernacular (“silogisariwas drowned at Sturbrydge Fayre,” 165 ). For
Skelton, the intrusion of imitation leadsto a brutal carnival of scapegoating, in
which Donatus is“dryven out of scole”( 170 ), Alexander (“aganderof
Menanders pole,” 173 ) cast out of the gate. In such a context,“breaking
Priscian’shead,”a phrase Skelton may have coined in English (“Prisians hed
broken now, handy-dandy,” 171 ), is far from being the dead metaphor it was to
become. The passage is profoundly reminiscent of the“scholastic battle play”
of medievaldisputationesdescribed by Jody Enders, the bellicose theatricalizing
of academic display with its personifiedimagines agentes.^32
The poem’s penultimate section, covering Skelton’s distant perceptions
of Wolsey’s conduct at the Calais conference and his supposed papal
aspirations, carries forward the mapping of Wolsey’s curious peregrinations:
Mapping Skelton:“Esebon, Marybon, Wheston next Barnet” 155