Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

the petitioner’s body

One possible approach to the self-contradictory Dunbar of the petitionary
poems is to assimilate him to a penitential vision of the self as variable and
fickle, beyond the rule of reason and constantly slipping back into sin
because it is outflanked by an unpredictable corporeality. This penitential
emphasis on human unpredictability and its roots in the body–Rutebeuf
regrets that“J’ai fait au cors sa volontei”[“I’ve given my body its head”]^31 –
for some readers lends the petitionary poem a striking verisimilitude. In
J. A. Burrow’s sensitive appraisal, the genre becomes the locus of a“discov-
ery of the individual”in English poetry; as poets try to amuse potentially
generous patrons by entertainingly recounting the hard-luck stories of their
lives, they discover autobiography.^32 While Burrow’s account raises some
questions that I will address below, it well describes the sophistication of
many begging-poems from the Middle Ages. The twelfth-century Archpoet
confronts his audience with“Vitam meum vobis enucleo, / paupertatem
meam non taceo”[“I’ll lay bare my life to you, and not hide my poverty”].^33
Deschamps breaks off his tale of the miseries of being horseless to ask a
laughing audience, “Est ce beaus gieux que dolens vous raconte?”
[“Can this be a good joke if I suffer as I tell it to you?”].^34 The French
rhétoriqueurGuillaume Crétin, as far as we can judge Dunbar’s direct
contemporary, says at the outset of one verse epistle that he can tell of his
troubles without“grande solemnité.”The humor, however, soon takes on a
more sombre tone:

Quant a part moy je pense et me souvient

Du temps passé, et de celluy qui vient,

Que j’ay vescu, et qu’il fault que je vive,

Et que le sort sur moy si mal advient,

A peine scay que tout mon sens devient,

Craignant de veoir que paovreté s’ensuyve...^35

[When I consider and remember times past and to come, that I have lived and yet
must live through, and that fate treats me so poorly, I hardly know what will
become of my sanity, fearing as I do to see poverty follow...]

The petitioner is often conspicuously subject to old age, a factor that
Dunbar’s poems handle variously. In“This waverand warldis wretchidnes”
(B 79 ), Dunbar, weary of“The lang availl [service]onhumill[humble]
wyse”( 14 ), is a knowingexemplumof the mutability“Offthisfalsfailʒeand
[failing]warld” ( 94 ).^36 From this position, however, he opens up a gap
between the institutional weight of complaint and the apparent pettiness of

“My panefull purs so priclis me” 71