[I cough endlessly, as if I were consumptive. My pulse tells me death is not far off.
My feet prove I’m helpless, as does the rest of my body.]
Machaut and Molinet both display in their poems the single eye we have
noted in connection with the petitionary poet’s vision.^43 For Crétin, the
physical miseries of serving the prince are writ deliriously large:
Le jeu me fuyt, malheureté m’aterre
Pour entonner goutte,fiebvre, catharre,
Froid, chault, faim, soif, pulces, pulnaises et poulz,
Boutz, mal de dents, rongne, entrac, morve, toux,
Viennent souvent...[Pastimeflies from me, misery knocks me down to pour gout into me, fever,
catarrh, cold, heat, hunger, thirst,fleas, bedbugs and lice, toothaches, scabies,
carbuncles, snot, coughs visit me often...]
Organic growth is a thing brutishly apart from thefluctuating desires and
disappointments of royal service:“Espoir me paist de promesses et veux, / Et
ne me croist que la barbe et cheveulx”[“Hope feeds me with promises and
oaths, and all that grows is my beard and hair”].^44
In Dunbar, as in Hoccleve (“My body and purs been at oones seeke”),^45
the ailing body merges with that characteristic stage property of petitionary
poetry, the disordered and unregulated purse that cannot hold its contents.
The trope’s lineage is a long one. Walter of Châtillon laments that“in
deserto mundi huius / nemofloret, nisi cuius / bursa nondum vomuit”[“in
the desert of this world no oneflourishes, unless his purse never vomits”].^46
In one notable contrary instance, Deschamps reads the“retention”of his
salary as constipation:
au partir leflux du ventre avoye,
Or ne l’aray des mois ne des sepmaine;
Qu’entre les gens mon seigneur de Touraine
N’a homme nul qui ait esté restraint,
Fors Eustace qui de ce se complaint,
A qui on a .xx. jours serré le ventre
Sans croix avoir; pour ce doubte et se craint
Qu’il ne puisse jamaiz aler a chambre.^47[When we left I had theflux of the belly, but now I won’t have it for months or
weeks; no one among my lord of Touraine’s people has been blocked, apart from
Eustache who is lamenting about it; for his belly has been stopped without a cross
for twenty days, so that he cannot go to the privy.]
74 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland