Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

associated with those members of the southern Scottish nobility opposed to
James III’s pursuit of closer ties with England and the attendant loss of
profitable border raids. (Liddale was steward to one of the most prominent
among them, the king’s brother Alexander Stewart, Duke of Albany.^55 )
Whatever the role of Wallace of Craigie and Halkerton in the production
of Hary’s work, their cooption in thefiction supplies a suggestive imaginary
template of a political structure. It has been argued by Sally Mapstone that
James III’s reign did not see the“court culture”that was to emerge with
James IV; the Scottish polity at this stage was dependent on a cluster of
regional interdependencies between and among crown and magnates.^56
“Patronage”here is complicated in a style that suggests–in manner if not
in content–a coconspiratorial, quasi-Chaucerian audience rather than the
defining relationships offifteenth-century England.^57 TheWallacehints at a
distinct patronal economy, just as the work of Douglas, Dunbar and
Lyndsay will suggest in their own ways a sudden and even vertiginous
centralizing of this wider compass.

cancelled counsel

Fifteenth-century poetry supplies its own theorization of the poetic subject
and identification. One of thesententiaetranslated in George Ashby’s
version of theDicta philosophorumputs the relationship between subject
and noble into peculiarly clear relief, also exposing its underlying social
constraints:

A seruaunt shold nat be euen equal

To his lorde, but in thre thinges trewly,

That is, in feithe, wytte, & pacience al,

Not in estate nor clothinges richely,

Ner in other delites excessely;

But iche man knowe hym self and his degre,

Non excedyng for possibilite.^58

The“seruaunt”may model himself inwardly and ethically after“his lorde,”
aspiring to the virtues of“feithe, wytte, & pacience al”–the merits which,
according to innumerable advisory texts of the period, accompanied aristo-
cratic magnanimity. He must not, on the other hand, lay claim to the
outward splendor by which the noble body differentiates itself from that
of the commoner: such imitation in a servant would amount to excess, of
the kind that sumptuary laws were expressly passed to prohibit.^59 The
“sentence”uncannily prefigures Freud’s formulation, in“The Ego and the
Id,”of the ego-ideal’s or super-ego’s workings: the super-ego’s“relation to

12 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland