Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

ʒett will he tak ane vther and gar it suey. cause;sway

Quha best can rewll wald maist haue gouernance.”

( 101 – 05 )

Bawcutt sees these lines as a reference back to the greedy Kirkpakar, and
punctuates accordingly. They cannot, however, be entirely divorced from
the half-awake benefice seeker Dunbar, and they admit of a more unsettling
reading. If he received a benefice, Dunbar would immediately want
another; once again, he is no different from the rival-double. Dunbar’s
famous benefice is thusfinally subsumed in a more general human appeti-
tiveness that can never be fully satisfied. Having begun an allegorical
analysis of the close relationship between the states of court and petitioner,
the poem abruptly switches tactics, and the suppliant becomes less the
victim of“gredines”than its embodiment. While Bawcutt glosses“Quha
best can rewll wald maist have governance”as“Whoever can best rule
should have most authority,”the poem’s one witness, the Reidpeth MS,
reads“wald,”not“suld.”On such a construction Temperance’s maxim
proves not to resolve matters so much as to muddle them further, in a
bafflingly opaque generality reminiscent of Molinet’s self-dismantling fusil-
lades of proverbial wisdom. It applies to benefice seeker and king at once;
the vision of the perfect court has been replaced by the collapse of royal
voluntasand the petitioner’s greed alike into a lust for power ungrounded in
any conception of good government or“common profit.”Dunbar’s mini-
aturespeculum principisflaunts once again the inauthenticity of the speaker
of the petitionary poems, and the poem’s abrupt and explosive ending
(another demented cannon shot, as inThe Goldyn Targe) leaves a distinct
disquiet.

sovereign shadows

Sir David Lyndsay praised James IV of Scotland as the“Lode sterne and
lampe of libiralytie”and celebrated the renown of his household:

And, of his courte, throuch Europe sprang the fame

Of lustie lordis and lufesum ladyis ying,

Tryumphand tornayis, justyng and knychtly game,

With all pastyme accordyng for one kyng.

He wes the glore of princelie gouernyng...

Lindsay’s aim is in part to construct James as anexemplumof vainglory, as his
stellar court soon gives place to downfall at Flodden through“wylfull mysgo-
vernance.”^76 Yet his panegyric, however conventional, is borne out both by

82 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland