hoccleve and the apprehension of money

42
Published by Maney Publishing (c) W.S Maney & Son Limited hoccl€v€ anb th€ appu€h€nslon o~ mon€y ROBERT J. MEYER-LEE n the opening stanza of La male regle, Thomas Hoccleve makes the equation that vexes him not only in this poem but through- out his poetic career: o precious tresor inconparable! o ground and roote of prosperitee! o excellent richesse, commendable Abouen aIle pat in eerthe be! Who may susteene thyn aduersitee, What wight may him auante of worldly welthe, But if he fully stande in grace of thee, Eerthely god, piler of lyf, thow Helthe?1 I read portions of an earlier version of this essay at a session entitled, "Dramatizing Ex- change and Dramas of Exchange in Fifteenth-Century English Literature," at the Arizona Center for Medieval Studies Fourth Annual Conference, Tempe, February 14, 1998. I thank the organizer, Matthew Giancarlo, for including me on the panel and am also grate- ful for the responses I received from my listeners. In addition, lowe thanks to Christian Sheridan for his timely advice, Seeta Chaganti for her extensive feedback, my anonymous readers for their frank criticism, and Lee Patterson for his help and encouragement throughout the process. 1 La male regle lines 1-8, in Selections from Hoccleve, ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Claren- don Press, 1981). All subsequent citations to La male regle (MR) are to this edition and given in the text by line number. Exemplaria 13.1 2001 © Published by Pegasus Press, University of North Carolina at Asheville, Asheville, North Carolina.

Upload: agnesscott

Post on 16-Nov-2023

0 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

TRANSCRIPT

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

hoccleuroveuro anb theuroappueuroheuronslon o~ moneuroy

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

n the opening stanza of La male regle Thomas Hoccleve makesthe equation that vexes him not only in this poem but through-out his poetic career

o precious tresor inconparableo ground and roote of prosperiteeo excellent richesse commendableAbouen aIle pat in eerthe beWho may susteene thyn aduersiteeWhat wight may him auante of worldly weltheBut if he fully stande in grace of theeEerthely god piler of lyf thow Helthe1

I read portions of an earlier version of this essay at a session entitled Dramatizing Ex-change and Dramas of Exchange in Fifteenth-Century English Literature at the ArizonaCenter for Medieval Studies Fourth Annual Conference Tempe February 14 1998 Ithank the organizer Matthew Giancarlo for including me on the panel and am also grate-ful for the responses I received from my listeners In addition lowe thanks to ChristianSheridan for his timely advice Seeta Chaganti for her extensive feedback my anonymousreaders for their frank criticism and Lee Patterson for his help and encouragementthroughout the process

1 La male regle lines 1-8 in Selections from Hoccleve ed M C Seymour (Oxford Claren-don Press 1981) All subsequent citations to La male regle (MR) are to this edition andgiven in the text by line number

Exemplaria 131 2001 copy Published by Pegasus Press University of North Carolina atAsheville Asheville North Carolina

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

174 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

For Hoccleve the most apt metaphors for the Eerthely god Helthe are precious tresor and excellent richesse and lest wemiss the literal half of this equation he rhymes the gods name withworldly welthe As La male regleunfolds it becomes apparent thatmuch else is at stake in this notion of health despite its light hu-morous development health does not only mean mental and phys-ical well-being and as the poems penitential style and form makeclear spiritual health but also as Lee Patterson has shown standsfor the health of the realm2 Characteristically however the lack ofhealth deriving from Hoccleves personal lack of money is never farfrom the foreground Indeed as we know from an often-cited pas-sage near the end of the poem this texts inaugurating condition isthe social isolation brought on by Hoccleves financial woes

Eywhat is me pat to myself thus longeClappid haue I I trowe pat I raueA nay My poore purs and peynes strongeHan artid me speke as I spoken haue MR 393-96

Representing himself as overhearing and questioning the sanity ofhis own poem in the very act of writing it Hoccleve concludes in ef-fect Im not mad Im just out of cash

The sheer metatextuality of this and other passages and the frag-mented subjectivitywhich they convey have made Hoccleve a popularsubject of recent criticism some of the best of which has sought to lo-cate his proleptically postmodern self-representation in the conflu-ence of literary precedent and the demands of his Lancastrianhistorical moment In particular paying apt attention to Hocclevesown explanations for his autobiographical impulses a number of crit-ics have called attention to the centrality of the petitionary form in theproduction of his literary persona3 For Hoccleve in La male regleand

2 Eva M Thornley The Middle English Penitential Lyric and Hoccleves Autobio-graphical Poetry Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 3 (1967) 295-321 was the first to describethe poems penitential style and form Patterson argues for Health as the health of therealm in a forthcoming article entitled What is Me The Peculiarity of Thomas Hoc-cleve

3 For a superb example of this type of criticism see Ethan Knapp Bureaucratic Iden-tity and the Construction of the Self in Hoccleves Formulary and La male regle Speculum74 (1999) 357-76 who argues that [t]he class experience of financial anxiety providedthe impetus and the bureaucratic instrument of the petition provided the form throughwhich Hoccleve transformed the persona he inherited from Chaucer (365) See also the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 175

throughout his poetry poetic self-consciousness cannot be separatedfrom the financial anxiety motivating his repeated turns toward the lit-erary petition More specifically-and as I argue in this essay-Hoccleves thematic obsessions and formal predilections betray a con-sciousness drenched in the problematic notion of money This preoc-cupation I contend reflects much more than the fact that he feels(like many of us) underpaid rather conflated with literary exchangein the very form of the petition the structure of monetary exchangeinfects his writing both thematically and formally and becomes thesource of a poetic anxiety that is also his poetic inspiration

In demonstrating this claim which involves charting the hypothet-ical contours of Hoccleves consciousness this essay works from out-side in4 In the opening two relatively brief sections I first describethe unusual salience of money in the general socioeconomic and po-litical context as well as in the London-Westminster civil servant com-munity to which Hoccleve belonged and I next formulate a model forthe early fifteenth-century idea of money by reading the normativeclerical understanding of this idea through the lens of more recenttheories In the final longer section I turn to three of Hoccleve sworks-touching again on La male regle before providing more exten-sive readings of the prologue to the Regement of Princes and of theSerie~to examine how Hoccleves anxious pecuniary brooding playsout in both the form and content of his poetry In the end I hope toshow that with the notion of money Hoccleve discovers a capaciousformal model and thematic vehicle expressive of both the reach of hisliterary vision and the paradox at the center of it

chapter on Hoccleve in Judith Ferster Fictions of Advice The Literature and Politics of Coun-sel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press 1996) the sec-tion on Hoccleve in chapter 10 of Larry Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power TheMedieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge Cambridge University Press1994) which is a reworking of material previously published as The Kings Two VoicesNarrative and Power in Hoccleve s Regement of Princes in Literary Practice and Social Changein Britain 1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990)216--47 and] A Burrow The Poet as Petitioner SAC 3 (1981) 61-75

4 In charting Hoccleves consciousness I mean to take the first steps toward delineat-ing for an early fifteenth-eentury civil servant something akin to a phenomenology ofmoney For a much more detailed and wide-ranging account of a late medieval phenom-enology of exchange sec the forthcoming book by D Vance Smith (tentatively entitledArts of Possession The English Household Imaginary) in which he takes Piers Plowman to be acentral imaginative engagement with this phenomenology I thank Professor Smith for al-lowing me to preview mattTial from this book

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

176 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

The Experience of Money

A heuristically powerful but somewhat misleading way to ap-proach the general experience of money in late medieval England isto assume that this period represents an historical fulcrum thepoint of transition from feudalism to capitalism or the moment ofthe rise of the Inoney economy Yetwhile this transition and rise nodoubt did occur the nature of these changes continues to be a vex-ing problem Among economic historians there is no agreement onwhen they took place how long they took what their causes were oreven what precisely constitutes feudalism capitalism or a moneyeconomy5

In this essay then I assume only that the period from 1350 to1426 encompassing Hoccleves life and the preceding two decadeswas one of substantial socioeconomic (as well as political and reli-gious) turbulence6 In England the difficulties of the fourteenthcentury followed the boom of the thirteenth Prices then had beenrelatively stable because the supply and demand of goods had been

5 In regard to the late medieval andor early modern transition from feudalism to cap-italism see Christopher Dyer Were There Any Capitalists in Fifteenth-Century Englandin Enterprise and Individuals in Fifteenth-Century England ed Jennifer Kermode (StroudAlan Sutton 1991) 1-24 according to Dyer the 400 years between 1350 and 1750 can-not easily be described by means of the general labels available to us hence the cliche thatit was an age of transition (3) See also Rodney Hilton Class Conflict and the Crisis oFeu-dalism Essays in Medieval Social History (London Hambledon Press 1985) the collectedessays in Rodney Hilton ed The Transition from Feudalism and Capitalism (London NLB1976) especially the introductory essay by Hilton 9-30 Rj Holton The TransitionfromFeudalism to Capitalism (Houndmills MacMillan 1985) and Richard Lachmann FromManor to Market Structural Change in England 1536-1640 (Madison University ofWiscon-sin Press 1987) Similarly M M Postan The Rise of a Money Economy The EconomicHistory Review 14 (1944) 123-34 believes that the rise of the money economy was tem-porally and geographically discontinuous not so much a trend as a series of relativelyunique events

6 According to j A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve Some Redatings Review of EnglishStudies 46 (1995) 366-72 Hoccleve was born in 1366 or 1367 and died in 1426 Heworked as a clerk in the office of the Privy Seal from 1387 until shortly before his deathIn regard to the general economic trend of this period Francis Oakley The Medieval Ex-perience Foundations of Western Cultural Singularity (New York Charles Scribners Sons1974) writes that in the decades prior to Hoccleves birth population expansion hadceased serious and widespread famines had reappeared and the European economy hadbegun to slide into a financial crisis and a depression that was to last until the latter partof the fifteenth century (41) For a different view see A R Bridbury Economic GrowthEngland in theLater Middle Ages (London G Allen amp Unwin 1962) My use of the word tur-bulence here is meant to encompass local enclaves of prosperity as well as depression

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 177

relatively stable But in the decades following the Black Death thesituation changed dramatically prices for goods fell while wages forartisan and peasant labor rose7 Demesne farming became unprof-itable and landowners largely abandoned it the income they couldexpect from rents was not much better More and more labor serv-ices were commuted to wages furthering the erosion of non-mone-tary bonds between landowner and laborer and many of the latterwhether lawfully or not sold their labor to the highest bidder Therich-at least some of them-became poorer while some of thepoor became (a little) richer The Ordinance of Laborers of 1349the Statute of Laborers of 1351 and a series of sumptuary statutesbeginning in 1363 not to mention the outraged and anxious officialresponse to the rising of 1381 make it plain that this increased em-phasis on monetized labor was perceived as a fundamental threat tosocial order at least by those in power

In this very period England experienced a series of crises in itsmoney supply In the fourteenth century Harry Miskimin writesgold and silver mines failed largely because of technological obsta-cles bullion supplies were no longer sufficient [T]he govern-ment and principal citizens of England were acutely conscious ofa real shortage of money unrelieved by demographic financial orother factors8 Historians are still debating how much this shortagecontributed to the periods economic depression yet even thosewho believe its contribution to be marginal nevertheless attest to itsexistence as a problem well into the fifteenth century9 In an urbaneconomy in which the buying and selling of luxury goods played

7 For studies of the English economy following the Black Death see eg J L BoltonThe Medieval English Economy 1150-1500 (London Dent 1980) A R Bridbury The Eng-lish Economy from Bede to the Reformation (Woodbridge Suffolk Boydell Press 1992) JohnHatcher Plague Population and the English Economy 1348-1530 (London MacMillan1977) and especially R H Britnell The Commercialisation of English Society 1000-1500(Manchester Manchester University Press 1996)

8 Harry A Miskimin Monetary Movements and Market Structure Forces for Contrac-tion in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England Journal of Economic History 24 (1964)470-490 at 471-74

9 Eg [W]e find that the annual average output of coin from English mints plungeddramatically after the mid-fourteenth century and fell by a further 50 per cent comparing1350-1417 with 1418-60 and that frequent complaints were made about the shortage ofspecie by groups of merchants and tradesmen Moreover one notes that the periods oflowest mintings 1375-1407 and 1438-60 were also periods of lowest prices (HatcherPlague Population and the English Economy 474)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

178 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

such an important role-the preeminent example of which inearly fifteenth-century England was Hoccleves London andWestminster-a dearth of coin alongside the problematic combina-tion of rising wages and falling prices was no doubt felt acutely Thecoin shortage that began in the 1390s and reached a post-plague lowin 1417 hit the urban tradespeople hard as they saw their labor costsrise while the money supply and prices for goods felllO As Hoc-cleves complaint in the Regement of Princes about the scarsetee ofcoin suggests this shortage was no abstract economic problem butwas perceived at least by London dwellers as a concrete sign of trou-bled timesll At the same time London and Westminster continued

10 For a detailed discussion of the problems of one such group of tradespeople seePamela Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community The Grocers Company and the Politicsand Trade of London 1000-1485 (New Haven Yale University Press 1995)318-98 Britnell(The Commercialisation of English Society 182) describes this period roughly 1395-1417 asparticularly troublesome in regard to the English money supply-a period that certainlynot merely coincidentally covers most of Hocc1eves poetic career For an analysis of therelationship of the coin shortage and especially counterfeiting with Lollardy insurrec-tion and other contributors to Lancastrian political anxiety see the chapter entitledCounterfeiters Lollards and Lancastrian Unease in Paul Strohm Englands EmptyThrone Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399-1422 (New Haven Yale Univer-sity Press 1998) which is a revised version of an artic1e of the same title in New MedievalLiteratures 1 (1997) 31-58 According to Strohm the fourteenth and early fifteenth cen-turies in England did in fact represent a kind of historical fulcrum as they were the pointat which monarchs sought to exert their practical and symbolic authority over monetarycirculation requiring that gold function as monetary general equivalent only under thesign of their approval (Englands Empty Throne 151) If this was indeed the case then notonly money in general but also the semiotics of money in particular (which I discuss inthe next section of this essay) must have been unusually salient for Hocc1eve

11 This complaint is put into the mouth of Hocc1eves interlocutor the Old Man whoseapparently kind gesture of pecuniary selflessness is of course Hocc1eves humorous wayof expressing precisely the opposite

Than mighte silver walke more thikkeAmong the peple than that it dooth nowTher wolde I fayn that were yset the prikke-Nat for myself I shal do wel ynow-But sone for that swiche men as thowThat with the world wrastlen mighte han plenteeOf coyn whereas yee han now scarsetee

Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes ed Charles R Blyth (Kalamazoo Medieval InstitutePublications 1999) 52~32 All subsequent citations of this poem (RP) are from this edi-tion and are given in the text by line number In a few cases I have altered the punctuationI have also consulted Hoccleves warns The Regement of Princes and 14 of Hoccleves Minor Poemsed Frederick J Furnivall EETS es 72 (London Kegan Paul Trench amp Tnibner 1897)and for convenience I use Furnivalls more common spelling of the poems title

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 179

to be the national center of conspicuous consumption On his wayto work every morning Hoccleve could not have missed what Ger-vase Rosser describes as [t] he fashionable excesses of courtcouture-excesses that could only have been magnified by contrastsince as in todays New York City [l]ife in Westminster entailedconstant exposure to the extremes of wealth and poverty12Moneyor the lack of it was never far from the mind of a City dweller andfor many it no doubt loomed large in their perception of what waswrong with the world As one contemporary of Hoccleve complainsvisiting in turn everyone from the man of lawat Westminster to thebarge-man at Belyngsgate for lack ofmony I cold not spede13

The political situation of the early fifteenth century greatly exac-erbated-if not indeed produced-this perception At what was thegreatest political crisis of Hoccleves lifetime the deposition ofRichard II one of the principal charges against Richard was that hewas a poor money manager-in the words of one historian that hehad heedlessly squandered the revenues of the Crown on favouritesand had then been compelled to levyunwarranted taxes on his sub-jects 14That such an accusation could legitimate a deposition sug-gests not only that money was a prominent object of politicalconcern but also that its proper management was understood asfundamental to a healthy kingdom Such an understanding wouldin fact haunt Richards successor throughout his reign Henry IVsfinances as is well-known were a disaster He had less income thanRichard but greater expenses as he had obligations not only to his

12 Gervase Rosser Medieval Westminster 1200-1540 (Oxford Clarendon Press 1989)145225Britnell notes that Westminsters booming market for luxury goods was drivenby an exceptional concentration of expenditure by families in the upper income brack-ets (The Commercialisation of English Society 1000-1500 194)

13 This is one permutation of the refrain of London Lickpenny in Rossel Hope Robbinsed Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York Columbia University Press1959) 130-34 Although this poem is not about the general as much as one individualsshortage of coin the reliance of the London economy on the easy flow of money and thecorruption that is perceived as deriving therefrom is readily apparent in the poets vividcomplaint See also in the same volume the immediately following poem Money Money

14 G L Harriss Financial Policy in Henry V The Practice of Kingship ed G L Harris(Oxford Oxford University Press 1985) 159-79 at 160 In addition to this article in thisparagraph I rely on Christopher Allmand Henry V (London Methuen 1992) 384-403Chris Given-Wilson The Royal Household and the Kings Affinity (New Haven Yale UniversityPress 1986)76-141 and E FJacob The Fifteenth Century 1399-1485 (Oxford ClarendonPress 1961) 73-90

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

180 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

own supporters but to virtually all of Richards (whom he for obvi-ous reasons did not wish to alienate) as well as the costs of theWelsh rebellion and the keeping of a household that quickly becamejust as if not more lavish than his predecessors Not surprisinglythen from the beginning of Henry IVs reign the Commons washighly critical of his money management and-most relevant to mypurposes here-especially critical of his handling of annuities Thiscriticism cut two ways on the one hand Henry was seen as too gen-erous in granting annuities burdening the Crown revenue with alarge indefinite annual commitment on the other he was taken totask for being constantly behind in payments especially since manyof the recipients were in Parliament The problem was deemed im-portant enough that in his first Parliament Henry V was authorizedto reduce annuities by pound10000 and by 1421 he had cut them bypound12000 to about half the amount supported by his father Suchmeasures although by and large seen by historians as necessary andeffective could not but have been experienced by the recipients ofannuities-as we see in the case of Hoccleve-as a sign of the con-tinuing instability of the realm rather than its reinvigoration

Hoccleves specific place in this general socioeconomic and polit-ical context was as ambiguous as it was insecure As a petty civil ser-vant in the early fifteenth century he had no pre-established place inthe ideology of estates he was neither gentle nor (actively) clericalnor a laborer nor even a member of the ambiguous but well-estab-lished class of merchants Moreover although Michael Bennet claimsthat in general [p] oor clerks and minor court officials shared theworld of petty artisans and retailers Hoccleves standard of living atleast while he lived at Chesters Inn with his fellow Privy Seal clerkswas most likely more lavish than would be expected for one of his so-cioeconomic status15John Burrow in his extremely informative bio-bibliography of the poet refers to this Inn as a hostel 16 but it wasas the London house of the Bishop of Chester and the residence ofthe Keeper of the Privy Seal-who was after the Chancellor and theTreasurer the third most important minister of state-most likely

15 Michael Bennett Careerism in Late Medieval England in People Politics and Com-munity in the Later Middle Ages edJoel Rosenthal and Colin Richmond (Gloucester AlanSutton 1987) 19-39 at 32

16J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve (Aldershot Variorum 1994)7

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 181

more luxurious than that term now connotes From his study of thewill of john Prophete who was Keeper from 1406-15 A L Brownconcludes that the household that the Keeper maintained with hisclerks was quite elaborate Clearly Prophete and surely the otherkeepers also maintained a large household and it is not surprisingthat Hoccleve worried about the poor cot he would live in when heretired 17 Indeed several times in the Regement of Princes Hocclevemakes clear that his fear over the loss of his income is so powerfulprecisely because he is so used to a relatively luxurious life-see eglines 847967-73 and most explicitly 1220-23

I have had habundanceOf welfare ay and now stond in the plytOf scarsetee it were a greet penanceFor me-God sheelde me fro that streit chance

Living in a lavish household and in his work frequently coming intocontact with aristocrats and even members of the royal family Hoc-cleve had a taste of a gentlemans standard of living that belied hismore income-appropriate socioeconomic association with petty ar-tisans and retailers He knew both what it was like to live like an aris-tocrat and at the same time that such a life was in fact well beyondhis means

Lurking at the center of this ambiguity was for Hoccleve the in-escapable relation between money and his social location He wasentirely dependant on the Privy Seal for his livelihood and we knowfrom his own repeated references to the fact that the most crucialcomponent of this livelihood was his annuitee 18 A semiannual

17 A L Brown The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fifteenth Century in The Study ofMedieval Records Essays in Honor of Kathleen Major ed D A Ballough and R L Storey (Ox-ford Clarendon Press 1971)260-81 at 266 Browns conclusion that the clerks dwelt inthe Keepers household was an issue that T F Tout Chapters in the Administrative History ofMediaeval England The Wardrobe the Chamber and the Small Seals (Manchester University ofManchester Press 1930) left inconclusive In regard to the Privy Seal clerks generally in-flated socioeconomic status see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity the very same momentthat had witnessed a crisis of financial insecurity on the part of these clerks also seems tohave witnessed an elevation in their social position (364) For the economic role playedby the aristocratic inn during Hoccleves lifetime see Caroline M Barron Centres ofConspicuous Consumption The Aristocratic Town House in London 1200-1550 LondonJournal 20 (1995) 1-16

18 Eg Ill theschequeer he of his special grace Hath to me grauntid an annuitee Of tw(nti mark whyle I have lyves space (RP820-22)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

182 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

royal grant of a fixed amount this source of income had neither awages direct relation to labor and potential for negotiation nor abenefices long-term stability and independence from labor Thus initself socially ambiguous this source of income was nevertheless ashe himself vividly describes in La male regle the essential element ofHoccleves social identity

Wher was a gretter maister eek than ~Or bet aqweyntid at Westmynstre YateAmong the tauerneres namelyAnd cookes whan I cam eerly or lateI pynchid nat at hem in myn acateBut paied hem as pat they axe woldeWherfore I was the welcomere algateAnd for a verray gentil man yholde

Othir than maistir callid was I neuereAmong this meynee in myn audienceMe thoughte I was ymaad a man foreuereSo tikelid me pat nyce reuerencepat it me made largere of despenseThan pat I thoghte han been MR 177-206

His title of maister and his status as gentil depended not uponanything inherent in his position but upon the fact that he paiedthe tavern-keepers cooks and boatmen as pat they axe wolde Hisannuity made his social status bluntly quantifiable in economicterms he was precisely twenty marks worth of a maister 19 Cor-relatively this meant that being yrnaad a man was inseparable fromthe knowledge that such a monetarily propped status was self-consuming-that his title of maister required him to spend thevery money that produced it And what was even more central toHoccleves great anxiety the disbursement of the money that madepossible this status was utterly unpredictable it was always late often

19 In other words Hoccleves social status was perceived as directly proportional to themoney in his pocket This fact resonates with Hoccleves complaint in the Regement ofPrinces that his wit (or more precisely the wit he is recognized as possessing) is directlyproportional to his silver For althogh that myn heed undir myn hood Was neverewysyit whyl it with me stood So that I hadde silver resonable My lytil wit was sumwhatcovenable (1236-39)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 183

under threat of being suspended and on at least two occasions ap-parently not paid20

Given then both the real unpredictability and indeterminate so-cial status of his annuity an ambiguous social location whose tenu-ous elevation was based to a large degree on the fact that he hadsuch an income and the very public relationship between annuitiesin general and the troubles of his Lancastrian employers it is not atall surprising that Hoccleve s pervasive sense of his own and theworlds instability often seized on the idea of money as its imagina-tive vehicle As he laments in the Regement of Princes immediatelyafter revealing the source of his twenti mark income

Mighte I ay payd been of that dueteeIt sholde stonde weI ynow with meBut paiement is hard to gete adayesAnd that me putte in many foule affrayes RP 823-26

Hoccleves poetry of foule affrayes-ie his miserable distur-bances or fears hence his profound anxiety-derives from his ob-sessive concern with money in an historical context troubled ingeneral with money problems For Hoccleve money was not simplya financial instrument but the natural poetic vehicle for exploring aview of the world whose cracks and seams were beginning to show

Amidst the political social religious and economic unrest of theearly fifteenth century Hoccleve as poems such as the Remonstranceagainst Oldcastle suggest wanted to hold onto a traditional world vieweven though to do so meant seeing much of his world as corrupt Inthis regard Derek Pearsalls description of Langland holds as wellfor Hoccleve his response to the social realities he perceives is al-ways that of a devout Christian who sees all change and transforma-tion as a form of decay and who struggles to comprehend thenature of change within the structure of a traditional mode of

20 See J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 8-9 12-13 for a discussion of Hoccleves annuityas well as the appendix of this book (33-49) listing mentions of Hoccleve in the historicalrecord including each of his annuity payments For a similar reading of the maister pas-sage in La male regle see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity 364 Some critics finding thenumber and extent of Hoccleves financial complaints to belie the typicality and to out-weigh the real gravity of his situation show little sympathy for his obsession See for ex-ample Malcolm Richardson Hoccleve in His Social Context ChauR20 (1986) 313-22

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

184 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

thought 21 Hoccleve was in his struggle to understand his changingworld and his place within it experiencing what sociologists today calla crisis of meaning his own traditionalism did not seem to haveplace for someone in his position22 In this situation an individualmay either reject the reigning world view and search for alternativesor try to discover and even ameliorate what has gone wrong (I use in-dividual agency figuratively here crises of meaning and responses tothem are of course both psychological and social phenomena) Thetradespeople of London for readily apparent reasons frequentlychose the first strategy and in the early fifteenth century their het-erodoxy often took the form of Lollardy23 Such antitraditionalism al-though assuming a quite different form may also be observed amongHoccleves fellow clerks While far from being LOllards these clerksleveraged their novel professional situation to their own financial ben-efit demonstrating a nascent entrepreneurship quite out of keeping

21 Derek Pearsall Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman in Medieval English Stud-ies Presented to GeorgeKane ed Edward Donald Kennedy Ronald Waldron and Joseph SWittig (Wolfeboro NH DS Brewer 1988) 167-85 at 174-75 Strohms characterizationof Hoccleves orthodoxy is unequivocal his text everywhere announces its preferencefor the orthodox and the legitimate in their struggle against adulteration (EnglandsEmpty Throne 146) For a recent analysis of the Regement and the Remonstrance Against Old-castle that suggests how disturbingly clever Hoccleve could be at expressing this politicaland religious orthodoxy see Ruth Nisse Oure Fadres Olde and Modres GenderHeresy and Hocc1eves Literary Politics SAC21 (1999) 275-99

22 For a helpful discussion of this kind of personal and social crisis see Peter L Bergerand Thomas Luckmann Modernity Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning The Orientation ofModern Man (Giitersloh Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers 1995) The condition fora crisis of meaning is that the members of a particular life-community accept unques-tioningly the degree of coincidence of meaning expected of them but are unable tomatch it [T]his discrepancy between is and should appears particularly often if theideals of a life community insist that it should be a complete community of meaning(23) From the evidence of his poetry we can gather that Hoccleve at least wished to ac-cept unquestioningly the traditional world view and just as certainly he-because thatworld view could not really account for him-was unable to match it in all his percep-tions and actions

23 Lollardy had spread rapidly in the City especially among the literate middle classwho now that their own economic failure was threatened resented more than ever thewealth of the Church (Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community 74) InterestinglyNightingale notes on the next page that Robert Chichele one of the aldermen of the Gro-cers Company when its ordinances were translated into English in 1418 commissionedHoccleve to translate a ballad into English This is the poem Furnivall calls An EnglishtBalade to the Virgin and Christ in Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Frederick J Furni-vall et al EETS es 61 and 73 (London Oxford University Press 1970) 67-72

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 185

with the official clerical attitude toward moneymaking In a profes-sion increasingly pervaded by money Privy Seal clerks such asRobert Frye became wealthy in part because they had no compunc-tions about influence-peddling or moneylending24 Perhaps becausehis attempts to make money in this manner failed more often thanthey succeeded-as he himself describes in the Regement of Princes(1499-547) where he complains that clerks are often cheated- out ofthe fee by which they are enticed to pen something favorable to aLord-Hoccleve chose to remain a traditionalist Hoccleve a clericin minor orders who kept up a hope for a benefice for at least tenand possibly twenty years or more responded to a personal and so-cial crisis of meaning by searching for what went wrong

The Idea of Money

Georg Simmel the great turn-of-the-century sociologist offers thefollowing formulation of the idea of money

Money is the representative of abstract value From the eco-nomic relationship ie the exchangeability of objects the factof this relationship is extracted and acquires in contrast tothose objects a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbolMoney is a specific realization of what is common to economicobjects25

From this he derives two important-and bipolar-corollaries Firstas the representation of value that is common to economic objectsmoney foregrounds the differential relativity of value ie the factthat rather than having intrinsic worth each object obtains valueonly in relation to all other objects a relation mediated by the com-mon measurement of price In Simmels words money

24 See Browns discussion of Frye (The Privy Seal Clerks 272-75) and Richardsonscomparison of Frye and Hoccleve (Hoccleve in His Social Context 314-21) as well asTout Chapters in the Administrative History on which both of the former two studies draw

25 Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Money trans Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (Lon-don Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1978) 120 Among alternative theoretical frameworks themost notable is Marxs whose formulation of money as the universal equivalent form issimilar to Simmels His notion of what constitutes economic value is however quite dif-fenmiddotnt See in Capital A Critique of Political Economy trans Ben Fowkes (HarmondsworthPenguin Books 1976) the first 75 pages or so and in Grundrisse Foundations of the Cri-tique of Political Economy trans Martin Nicolaus (New York Vintage Books 1973) thechapttT on money

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

186 Hoccleue and the Apprehension of Money

represents within the practical world the most certain imageand the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being ac-cording to which things receive their meaning through eachother and have their being determined by their mutual rela-tions (128)

Such relativity necessarily entails some degree of awareness of the in-stability or unfixedness of value as the worth of objects as measuredby price changes as the relationships among objects-and betweenobjects and money-change since the value of things has becomedetached from the objects and has acquired an independent exis-tence in a specific substance money can develop interests move-ments and norms that on occasion act contrary to those of thesymbolized objects (165) Second and conversely because moneyis the universal representation of economic value it appears to standabove values differential relativity

By sublimating the relativity of things money seems to avoidrelativity [M]oney as abstract value expresses nothing butthe relativity of things that constitute value and money asthe stable pole contrasts with eternal movements fluctuationsand equations of objects (121)

When apprehended in this manner money obtains the character ofa psychological absolute as llthe absolutely commensurate expres-sion and equivalent of all values money possesses a significant re-lationship to the notion of God (236) The danger here is thatmoney as an absolute means very easily becomes an absolute end-not the mediator of desired objects but the object of all desire

Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its qualityas a means to its convertibility into more definite values sothoroughly and unreservedly developed into a completelyengrossing final purpose governing our practical conscious-ness (232)

In this situation all objects index money rather than vice-versa andthe notion of money displaces God as the transcendental signified-a sin Hoccleve would have recognized as cupiditas26

26 Cf Marxs understanding of money as the lord and god of the world of commodi-ties (Grundrisse 221) For the echo of Derrida in my phrasing here see R A ShoafDante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word Money Images and Reference in Late Medieval

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 187

Whether or not we agree with Marx that the notion of greed is in-separable from the economic function of the money form it is cer-tainly the case that in the Middle Ages cupiditas was increasinglyseen as the most serious of the sins27 The Church of course hadmuch to say about this sin my specific concern here is with greedsrelationship to the clerical understanding of money the prominentfeature of which was the notion of just price For Aquinas whosereading of Aristotle was the point of departure for just price theoriststhroughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

[I]f either the price exceed the quantity of the things worthor conversely the thing exceed the price there is no longer theequality of justice and consequently to sell a thing for morethan its worth or to buy it for less than its worth is in itself un-just and unlawful 28

Such a rule of commerce depends obviously on the worth of athing being based on something other than price and for Aquinasthis extra-monetary referent is human need for which money is anumerical index But this one standard which truly measures allthings is demand This includes all commutable things inasmuch as

Poetry (Norman Okla Pilgrim Books 1983) Money is preeminently the meanswhich becomes an end Money is accumulated want without a referent able to refer toanything or nothing and therefore likely in the absence of anything else to refer to itself(241)

27 For Marxs argument see eg Grundrisse Money is therefore not only the objectbut also the fountainhead of greed (222) For one of the many discussions of greed inthe Middle Ages see Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages trans Rodney J Pay-ton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1996)25-27

28 Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica22 q 77 art 1 trans Fathers of the English Do-minican Province (New York Bezinger 1947) For a lucid discussion of just price theoriesthrough the thirteenth century see John W Baldwin The Medieval Theories of the JustPrice Romanists Canonists and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesTransactions of the American Philosophical Society49 (1959) 3-92 Of the three groups of the-orists Baldwin discusses the former two are fairly characterized as theorists of economicpractice while the latter may be described as theorists of economic ideology Since myconcern here is more with ideology than practice I take the theologians views as the me-dieval norm Also helpful in elucidating these views is Lester K Little Religious Poverty andthe Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1978) and espe-ciallYJoel Kaye Economy and Nature in theFourteenth Century (Cambridge Cambridge Uni-versity Press 1998) For a reading of Chaucers Shipmans Tale in light of the problematicbut nevertheless normative economic ideas Baldwin describes see Lee Patterson Chaucerand the Subject of Histary (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1991)349-65

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

188 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

everything has a reference to human need29 Although Aquinasrecognizes that the specific capacity to satisfy human need is not anabsolutely fixed quality of things-and this presents a theoreticalproblem inherited from Aristotle which he never fully resolves-itnevertheless ought to be determinable and relatively stable andthus prices in ajust world ought to reflect this determinacy and sta-bility Fluctuations in price although expected to some degree in-dicate a departure from the just norm a deviation from the idealmost likely motivated by cupiditas which in this regard is defined asthe desire simply to possess money rather than to use it to satisfy needHence Aquinas distinguishes between using money to satisfy theneeds of life and using it for profit which satisfies the greed forgain which knows no limit and tends to infinity 30Nicole Oresmethe fourteenth-century translator of Aristotle and author of De mon-eta (which was translated into English in the fifteenth century)makes much the same distinction in his description of money as ar-tificial riches in comparison to the natural riches of the com-modities it purchases any desire for purely monetary wealth istherefore vile and unnatural and stems from an individualsgreedy and disgraceful enhancement of his own profit31

I do not mean to imply here that the scholastic attempts to for-mulate a notion of just price represent an ignorance or oversimpli-cation of the nature of a money economy Rather Aquinass notionof just price represents as Joel Kaye has persuasively shown a so-phisticated attempt to reconcile the relativistic implications of amonetized economy with the traditional understanding of an onto-logically ordered universe of graded values where every object andsubject has its fixed place in the order of being from God down tothe least of his creations 32Yet on this topic Aquinass great pow-ers of synthesis do not entirely succeed Instead of forging an un-ambiguous link between divine justice and the dynamics of the

29 Aquinas Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 59981trans C 1 Litzinger (ChicagoHenry Regnery Company 1964)

30 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 431 The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents trans Charles Johnson

(London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1956)2542Oresme is specifically arguing hereagainst the profit-making activity of royal debasements of the coinage which he sees asworse than usury

32 Kaye Economy and Nature 50

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

174 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

For Hoccleve the most apt metaphors for the Eerthely god Helthe are precious tresor and excellent richesse and lest wemiss the literal half of this equation he rhymes the gods name withworldly welthe As La male regleunfolds it becomes apparent thatmuch else is at stake in this notion of health despite its light hu-morous development health does not only mean mental and phys-ical well-being and as the poems penitential style and form makeclear spiritual health but also as Lee Patterson has shown standsfor the health of the realm2 Characteristically however the lack ofhealth deriving from Hoccleves personal lack of money is never farfrom the foreground Indeed as we know from an often-cited pas-sage near the end of the poem this texts inaugurating condition isthe social isolation brought on by Hoccleves financial woes

Eywhat is me pat to myself thus longeClappid haue I I trowe pat I raueA nay My poore purs and peynes strongeHan artid me speke as I spoken haue MR 393-96

Representing himself as overhearing and questioning the sanity ofhis own poem in the very act of writing it Hoccleve concludes in ef-fect Im not mad Im just out of cash

The sheer metatextuality of this and other passages and the frag-mented subjectivitywhich they convey have made Hoccleve a popularsubject of recent criticism some of the best of which has sought to lo-cate his proleptically postmodern self-representation in the conflu-ence of literary precedent and the demands of his Lancastrianhistorical moment In particular paying apt attention to Hocclevesown explanations for his autobiographical impulses a number of crit-ics have called attention to the centrality of the petitionary form in theproduction of his literary persona3 For Hoccleve in La male regleand

2 Eva M Thornley The Middle English Penitential Lyric and Hoccleves Autobio-graphical Poetry Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 3 (1967) 295-321 was the first to describethe poems penitential style and form Patterson argues for Health as the health of therealm in a forthcoming article entitled What is Me The Peculiarity of Thomas Hoc-cleve

3 For a superb example of this type of criticism see Ethan Knapp Bureaucratic Iden-tity and the Construction of the Self in Hoccleves Formulary and La male regle Speculum74 (1999) 357-76 who argues that [t]he class experience of financial anxiety providedthe impetus and the bureaucratic instrument of the petition provided the form throughwhich Hoccleve transformed the persona he inherited from Chaucer (365) See also the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 175

throughout his poetry poetic self-consciousness cannot be separatedfrom the financial anxiety motivating his repeated turns toward the lit-erary petition More specifically-and as I argue in this essay-Hoccleves thematic obsessions and formal predilections betray a con-sciousness drenched in the problematic notion of money This preoc-cupation I contend reflects much more than the fact that he feels(like many of us) underpaid rather conflated with literary exchangein the very form of the petition the structure of monetary exchangeinfects his writing both thematically and formally and becomes thesource of a poetic anxiety that is also his poetic inspiration

In demonstrating this claim which involves charting the hypothet-ical contours of Hoccleves consciousness this essay works from out-side in4 In the opening two relatively brief sections I first describethe unusual salience of money in the general socioeconomic and po-litical context as well as in the London-Westminster civil servant com-munity to which Hoccleve belonged and I next formulate a model forthe early fifteenth-century idea of money by reading the normativeclerical understanding of this idea through the lens of more recenttheories In the final longer section I turn to three of Hoccleve sworks-touching again on La male regle before providing more exten-sive readings of the prologue to the Regement of Princes and of theSerie~to examine how Hoccleves anxious pecuniary brooding playsout in both the form and content of his poetry In the end I hope toshow that with the notion of money Hoccleve discovers a capaciousformal model and thematic vehicle expressive of both the reach of hisliterary vision and the paradox at the center of it

chapter on Hoccleve in Judith Ferster Fictions of Advice The Literature and Politics of Coun-sel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press 1996) the sec-tion on Hoccleve in chapter 10 of Larry Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power TheMedieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge Cambridge University Press1994) which is a reworking of material previously published as The Kings Two VoicesNarrative and Power in Hoccleve s Regement of Princes in Literary Practice and Social Changein Britain 1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990)216--47 and] A Burrow The Poet as Petitioner SAC 3 (1981) 61-75

4 In charting Hoccleves consciousness I mean to take the first steps toward delineat-ing for an early fifteenth-eentury civil servant something akin to a phenomenology ofmoney For a much more detailed and wide-ranging account of a late medieval phenom-enology of exchange sec the forthcoming book by D Vance Smith (tentatively entitledArts of Possession The English Household Imaginary) in which he takes Piers Plowman to be acentral imaginative engagement with this phenomenology I thank Professor Smith for al-lowing me to preview mattTial from this book

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

176 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

The Experience of Money

A heuristically powerful but somewhat misleading way to ap-proach the general experience of money in late medieval England isto assume that this period represents an historical fulcrum thepoint of transition from feudalism to capitalism or the moment ofthe rise of the Inoney economy Yetwhile this transition and rise nodoubt did occur the nature of these changes continues to be a vex-ing problem Among economic historians there is no agreement onwhen they took place how long they took what their causes were oreven what precisely constitutes feudalism capitalism or a moneyeconomy5

In this essay then I assume only that the period from 1350 to1426 encompassing Hoccleves life and the preceding two decadeswas one of substantial socioeconomic (as well as political and reli-gious) turbulence6 In England the difficulties of the fourteenthcentury followed the boom of the thirteenth Prices then had beenrelatively stable because the supply and demand of goods had been

5 In regard to the late medieval andor early modern transition from feudalism to cap-italism see Christopher Dyer Were There Any Capitalists in Fifteenth-Century Englandin Enterprise and Individuals in Fifteenth-Century England ed Jennifer Kermode (StroudAlan Sutton 1991) 1-24 according to Dyer the 400 years between 1350 and 1750 can-not easily be described by means of the general labels available to us hence the cliche thatit was an age of transition (3) See also Rodney Hilton Class Conflict and the Crisis oFeu-dalism Essays in Medieval Social History (London Hambledon Press 1985) the collectedessays in Rodney Hilton ed The Transition from Feudalism and Capitalism (London NLB1976) especially the introductory essay by Hilton 9-30 Rj Holton The TransitionfromFeudalism to Capitalism (Houndmills MacMillan 1985) and Richard Lachmann FromManor to Market Structural Change in England 1536-1640 (Madison University ofWiscon-sin Press 1987) Similarly M M Postan The Rise of a Money Economy The EconomicHistory Review 14 (1944) 123-34 believes that the rise of the money economy was tem-porally and geographically discontinuous not so much a trend as a series of relativelyunique events

6 According to j A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve Some Redatings Review of EnglishStudies 46 (1995) 366-72 Hoccleve was born in 1366 or 1367 and died in 1426 Heworked as a clerk in the office of the Privy Seal from 1387 until shortly before his deathIn regard to the general economic trend of this period Francis Oakley The Medieval Ex-perience Foundations of Western Cultural Singularity (New York Charles Scribners Sons1974) writes that in the decades prior to Hoccleves birth population expansion hadceased serious and widespread famines had reappeared and the European economy hadbegun to slide into a financial crisis and a depression that was to last until the latter partof the fifteenth century (41) For a different view see A R Bridbury Economic GrowthEngland in theLater Middle Ages (London G Allen amp Unwin 1962) My use of the word tur-bulence here is meant to encompass local enclaves of prosperity as well as depression

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 177

relatively stable But in the decades following the Black Death thesituation changed dramatically prices for goods fell while wages forartisan and peasant labor rose7 Demesne farming became unprof-itable and landowners largely abandoned it the income they couldexpect from rents was not much better More and more labor serv-ices were commuted to wages furthering the erosion of non-mone-tary bonds between landowner and laborer and many of the latterwhether lawfully or not sold their labor to the highest bidder Therich-at least some of them-became poorer while some of thepoor became (a little) richer The Ordinance of Laborers of 1349the Statute of Laborers of 1351 and a series of sumptuary statutesbeginning in 1363 not to mention the outraged and anxious officialresponse to the rising of 1381 make it plain that this increased em-phasis on monetized labor was perceived as a fundamental threat tosocial order at least by those in power

In this very period England experienced a series of crises in itsmoney supply In the fourteenth century Harry Miskimin writesgold and silver mines failed largely because of technological obsta-cles bullion supplies were no longer sufficient [T]he govern-ment and principal citizens of England were acutely conscious ofa real shortage of money unrelieved by demographic financial orother factors8 Historians are still debating how much this shortagecontributed to the periods economic depression yet even thosewho believe its contribution to be marginal nevertheless attest to itsexistence as a problem well into the fifteenth century9 In an urbaneconomy in which the buying and selling of luxury goods played

7 For studies of the English economy following the Black Death see eg J L BoltonThe Medieval English Economy 1150-1500 (London Dent 1980) A R Bridbury The Eng-lish Economy from Bede to the Reformation (Woodbridge Suffolk Boydell Press 1992) JohnHatcher Plague Population and the English Economy 1348-1530 (London MacMillan1977) and especially R H Britnell The Commercialisation of English Society 1000-1500(Manchester Manchester University Press 1996)

8 Harry A Miskimin Monetary Movements and Market Structure Forces for Contrac-tion in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England Journal of Economic History 24 (1964)470-490 at 471-74

9 Eg [W]e find that the annual average output of coin from English mints plungeddramatically after the mid-fourteenth century and fell by a further 50 per cent comparing1350-1417 with 1418-60 and that frequent complaints were made about the shortage ofspecie by groups of merchants and tradesmen Moreover one notes that the periods oflowest mintings 1375-1407 and 1438-60 were also periods of lowest prices (HatcherPlague Population and the English Economy 474)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

178 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

such an important role-the preeminent example of which inearly fifteenth-century England was Hoccleves London andWestminster-a dearth of coin alongside the problematic combina-tion of rising wages and falling prices was no doubt felt acutely Thecoin shortage that began in the 1390s and reached a post-plague lowin 1417 hit the urban tradespeople hard as they saw their labor costsrise while the money supply and prices for goods felllO As Hoc-cleves complaint in the Regement of Princes about the scarsetee ofcoin suggests this shortage was no abstract economic problem butwas perceived at least by London dwellers as a concrete sign of trou-bled timesll At the same time London and Westminster continued

10 For a detailed discussion of the problems of one such group of tradespeople seePamela Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community The Grocers Company and the Politicsand Trade of London 1000-1485 (New Haven Yale University Press 1995)318-98 Britnell(The Commercialisation of English Society 182) describes this period roughly 1395-1417 asparticularly troublesome in regard to the English money supply-a period that certainlynot merely coincidentally covers most of Hocc1eves poetic career For an analysis of therelationship of the coin shortage and especially counterfeiting with Lollardy insurrec-tion and other contributors to Lancastrian political anxiety see the chapter entitledCounterfeiters Lollards and Lancastrian Unease in Paul Strohm Englands EmptyThrone Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399-1422 (New Haven Yale Univer-sity Press 1998) which is a revised version of an artic1e of the same title in New MedievalLiteratures 1 (1997) 31-58 According to Strohm the fourteenth and early fifteenth cen-turies in England did in fact represent a kind of historical fulcrum as they were the pointat which monarchs sought to exert their practical and symbolic authority over monetarycirculation requiring that gold function as monetary general equivalent only under thesign of their approval (Englands Empty Throne 151) If this was indeed the case then notonly money in general but also the semiotics of money in particular (which I discuss inthe next section of this essay) must have been unusually salient for Hocc1eve

11 This complaint is put into the mouth of Hocc1eves interlocutor the Old Man whoseapparently kind gesture of pecuniary selflessness is of course Hocc1eves humorous wayof expressing precisely the opposite

Than mighte silver walke more thikkeAmong the peple than that it dooth nowTher wolde I fayn that were yset the prikke-Nat for myself I shal do wel ynow-But sone for that swiche men as thowThat with the world wrastlen mighte han plenteeOf coyn whereas yee han now scarsetee

Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes ed Charles R Blyth (Kalamazoo Medieval InstitutePublications 1999) 52~32 All subsequent citations of this poem (RP) are from this edi-tion and are given in the text by line number In a few cases I have altered the punctuationI have also consulted Hoccleves warns The Regement of Princes and 14 of Hoccleves Minor Poemsed Frederick J Furnivall EETS es 72 (London Kegan Paul Trench amp Tnibner 1897)and for convenience I use Furnivalls more common spelling of the poems title

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 179

to be the national center of conspicuous consumption On his wayto work every morning Hoccleve could not have missed what Ger-vase Rosser describes as [t] he fashionable excesses of courtcouture-excesses that could only have been magnified by contrastsince as in todays New York City [l]ife in Westminster entailedconstant exposure to the extremes of wealth and poverty12Moneyor the lack of it was never far from the mind of a City dweller andfor many it no doubt loomed large in their perception of what waswrong with the world As one contemporary of Hoccleve complainsvisiting in turn everyone from the man of lawat Westminster to thebarge-man at Belyngsgate for lack ofmony I cold not spede13

The political situation of the early fifteenth century greatly exac-erbated-if not indeed produced-this perception At what was thegreatest political crisis of Hoccleves lifetime the deposition ofRichard II one of the principal charges against Richard was that hewas a poor money manager-in the words of one historian that hehad heedlessly squandered the revenues of the Crown on favouritesand had then been compelled to levyunwarranted taxes on his sub-jects 14That such an accusation could legitimate a deposition sug-gests not only that money was a prominent object of politicalconcern but also that its proper management was understood asfundamental to a healthy kingdom Such an understanding wouldin fact haunt Richards successor throughout his reign Henry IVsfinances as is well-known were a disaster He had less income thanRichard but greater expenses as he had obligations not only to his

12 Gervase Rosser Medieval Westminster 1200-1540 (Oxford Clarendon Press 1989)145225Britnell notes that Westminsters booming market for luxury goods was drivenby an exceptional concentration of expenditure by families in the upper income brack-ets (The Commercialisation of English Society 1000-1500 194)

13 This is one permutation of the refrain of London Lickpenny in Rossel Hope Robbinsed Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York Columbia University Press1959) 130-34 Although this poem is not about the general as much as one individualsshortage of coin the reliance of the London economy on the easy flow of money and thecorruption that is perceived as deriving therefrom is readily apparent in the poets vividcomplaint See also in the same volume the immediately following poem Money Money

14 G L Harriss Financial Policy in Henry V The Practice of Kingship ed G L Harris(Oxford Oxford University Press 1985) 159-79 at 160 In addition to this article in thisparagraph I rely on Christopher Allmand Henry V (London Methuen 1992) 384-403Chris Given-Wilson The Royal Household and the Kings Affinity (New Haven Yale UniversityPress 1986)76-141 and E FJacob The Fifteenth Century 1399-1485 (Oxford ClarendonPress 1961) 73-90

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

180 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

own supporters but to virtually all of Richards (whom he for obvi-ous reasons did not wish to alienate) as well as the costs of theWelsh rebellion and the keeping of a household that quickly becamejust as if not more lavish than his predecessors Not surprisinglythen from the beginning of Henry IVs reign the Commons washighly critical of his money management and-most relevant to mypurposes here-especially critical of his handling of annuities Thiscriticism cut two ways on the one hand Henry was seen as too gen-erous in granting annuities burdening the Crown revenue with alarge indefinite annual commitment on the other he was taken totask for being constantly behind in payments especially since manyof the recipients were in Parliament The problem was deemed im-portant enough that in his first Parliament Henry V was authorizedto reduce annuities by pound10000 and by 1421 he had cut them bypound12000 to about half the amount supported by his father Suchmeasures although by and large seen by historians as necessary andeffective could not but have been experienced by the recipients ofannuities-as we see in the case of Hoccleve-as a sign of the con-tinuing instability of the realm rather than its reinvigoration

Hoccleves specific place in this general socioeconomic and polit-ical context was as ambiguous as it was insecure As a petty civil ser-vant in the early fifteenth century he had no pre-established place inthe ideology of estates he was neither gentle nor (actively) clericalnor a laborer nor even a member of the ambiguous but well-estab-lished class of merchants Moreover although Michael Bennet claimsthat in general [p] oor clerks and minor court officials shared theworld of petty artisans and retailers Hoccleves standard of living atleast while he lived at Chesters Inn with his fellow Privy Seal clerkswas most likely more lavish than would be expected for one of his so-cioeconomic status15John Burrow in his extremely informative bio-bibliography of the poet refers to this Inn as a hostel 16 but it wasas the London house of the Bishop of Chester and the residence ofthe Keeper of the Privy Seal-who was after the Chancellor and theTreasurer the third most important minister of state-most likely

15 Michael Bennett Careerism in Late Medieval England in People Politics and Com-munity in the Later Middle Ages edJoel Rosenthal and Colin Richmond (Gloucester AlanSutton 1987) 19-39 at 32

16J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve (Aldershot Variorum 1994)7

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 181

more luxurious than that term now connotes From his study of thewill of john Prophete who was Keeper from 1406-15 A L Brownconcludes that the household that the Keeper maintained with hisclerks was quite elaborate Clearly Prophete and surely the otherkeepers also maintained a large household and it is not surprisingthat Hoccleve worried about the poor cot he would live in when heretired 17 Indeed several times in the Regement of Princes Hocclevemakes clear that his fear over the loss of his income is so powerfulprecisely because he is so used to a relatively luxurious life-see eglines 847967-73 and most explicitly 1220-23

I have had habundanceOf welfare ay and now stond in the plytOf scarsetee it were a greet penanceFor me-God sheelde me fro that streit chance

Living in a lavish household and in his work frequently coming intocontact with aristocrats and even members of the royal family Hoc-cleve had a taste of a gentlemans standard of living that belied hismore income-appropriate socioeconomic association with petty ar-tisans and retailers He knew both what it was like to live like an aris-tocrat and at the same time that such a life was in fact well beyondhis means

Lurking at the center of this ambiguity was for Hoccleve the in-escapable relation between money and his social location He wasentirely dependant on the Privy Seal for his livelihood and we knowfrom his own repeated references to the fact that the most crucialcomponent of this livelihood was his annuitee 18 A semiannual

17 A L Brown The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fifteenth Century in The Study ofMedieval Records Essays in Honor of Kathleen Major ed D A Ballough and R L Storey (Ox-ford Clarendon Press 1971)260-81 at 266 Browns conclusion that the clerks dwelt inthe Keepers household was an issue that T F Tout Chapters in the Administrative History ofMediaeval England The Wardrobe the Chamber and the Small Seals (Manchester University ofManchester Press 1930) left inconclusive In regard to the Privy Seal clerks generally in-flated socioeconomic status see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity the very same momentthat had witnessed a crisis of financial insecurity on the part of these clerks also seems tohave witnessed an elevation in their social position (364) For the economic role playedby the aristocratic inn during Hoccleves lifetime see Caroline M Barron Centres ofConspicuous Consumption The Aristocratic Town House in London 1200-1550 LondonJournal 20 (1995) 1-16

18 Eg Ill theschequeer he of his special grace Hath to me grauntid an annuitee Of tw(nti mark whyle I have lyves space (RP820-22)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

182 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

royal grant of a fixed amount this source of income had neither awages direct relation to labor and potential for negotiation nor abenefices long-term stability and independence from labor Thus initself socially ambiguous this source of income was nevertheless ashe himself vividly describes in La male regle the essential element ofHoccleves social identity

Wher was a gretter maister eek than ~Or bet aqweyntid at Westmynstre YateAmong the tauerneres namelyAnd cookes whan I cam eerly or lateI pynchid nat at hem in myn acateBut paied hem as pat they axe woldeWherfore I was the welcomere algateAnd for a verray gentil man yholde

Othir than maistir callid was I neuereAmong this meynee in myn audienceMe thoughte I was ymaad a man foreuereSo tikelid me pat nyce reuerencepat it me made largere of despenseThan pat I thoghte han been MR 177-206

His title of maister and his status as gentil depended not uponanything inherent in his position but upon the fact that he paiedthe tavern-keepers cooks and boatmen as pat they axe wolde Hisannuity made his social status bluntly quantifiable in economicterms he was precisely twenty marks worth of a maister 19 Cor-relatively this meant that being yrnaad a man was inseparable fromthe knowledge that such a monetarily propped status was self-consuming-that his title of maister required him to spend thevery money that produced it And what was even more central toHoccleves great anxiety the disbursement of the money that madepossible this status was utterly unpredictable it was always late often

19 In other words Hoccleves social status was perceived as directly proportional to themoney in his pocket This fact resonates with Hoccleves complaint in the Regement ofPrinces that his wit (or more precisely the wit he is recognized as possessing) is directlyproportional to his silver For althogh that myn heed undir myn hood Was neverewysyit whyl it with me stood So that I hadde silver resonable My lytil wit was sumwhatcovenable (1236-39)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 183

under threat of being suspended and on at least two occasions ap-parently not paid20

Given then both the real unpredictability and indeterminate so-cial status of his annuity an ambiguous social location whose tenu-ous elevation was based to a large degree on the fact that he hadsuch an income and the very public relationship between annuitiesin general and the troubles of his Lancastrian employers it is not atall surprising that Hoccleve s pervasive sense of his own and theworlds instability often seized on the idea of money as its imagina-tive vehicle As he laments in the Regement of Princes immediatelyafter revealing the source of his twenti mark income

Mighte I ay payd been of that dueteeIt sholde stonde weI ynow with meBut paiement is hard to gete adayesAnd that me putte in many foule affrayes RP 823-26

Hoccleves poetry of foule affrayes-ie his miserable distur-bances or fears hence his profound anxiety-derives from his ob-sessive concern with money in an historical context troubled ingeneral with money problems For Hoccleve money was not simplya financial instrument but the natural poetic vehicle for exploring aview of the world whose cracks and seams were beginning to show

Amidst the political social religious and economic unrest of theearly fifteenth century Hoccleve as poems such as the Remonstranceagainst Oldcastle suggest wanted to hold onto a traditional world vieweven though to do so meant seeing much of his world as corrupt Inthis regard Derek Pearsalls description of Langland holds as wellfor Hoccleve his response to the social realities he perceives is al-ways that of a devout Christian who sees all change and transforma-tion as a form of decay and who struggles to comprehend thenature of change within the structure of a traditional mode of

20 See J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 8-9 12-13 for a discussion of Hoccleves annuityas well as the appendix of this book (33-49) listing mentions of Hoccleve in the historicalrecord including each of his annuity payments For a similar reading of the maister pas-sage in La male regle see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity 364 Some critics finding thenumber and extent of Hoccleves financial complaints to belie the typicality and to out-weigh the real gravity of his situation show little sympathy for his obsession See for ex-ample Malcolm Richardson Hoccleve in His Social Context ChauR20 (1986) 313-22

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

184 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

thought 21 Hoccleve was in his struggle to understand his changingworld and his place within it experiencing what sociologists today calla crisis of meaning his own traditionalism did not seem to haveplace for someone in his position22 In this situation an individualmay either reject the reigning world view and search for alternativesor try to discover and even ameliorate what has gone wrong (I use in-dividual agency figuratively here crises of meaning and responses tothem are of course both psychological and social phenomena) Thetradespeople of London for readily apparent reasons frequentlychose the first strategy and in the early fifteenth century their het-erodoxy often took the form of Lollardy23 Such antitraditionalism al-though assuming a quite different form may also be observed amongHoccleves fellow clerks While far from being LOllards these clerksleveraged their novel professional situation to their own financial ben-efit demonstrating a nascent entrepreneurship quite out of keeping

21 Derek Pearsall Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman in Medieval English Stud-ies Presented to GeorgeKane ed Edward Donald Kennedy Ronald Waldron and Joseph SWittig (Wolfeboro NH DS Brewer 1988) 167-85 at 174-75 Strohms characterizationof Hoccleves orthodoxy is unequivocal his text everywhere announces its preferencefor the orthodox and the legitimate in their struggle against adulteration (EnglandsEmpty Throne 146) For a recent analysis of the Regement and the Remonstrance Against Old-castle that suggests how disturbingly clever Hoccleve could be at expressing this politicaland religious orthodoxy see Ruth Nisse Oure Fadres Olde and Modres GenderHeresy and Hocc1eves Literary Politics SAC21 (1999) 275-99

22 For a helpful discussion of this kind of personal and social crisis see Peter L Bergerand Thomas Luckmann Modernity Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning The Orientation ofModern Man (Giitersloh Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers 1995) The condition fora crisis of meaning is that the members of a particular life-community accept unques-tioningly the degree of coincidence of meaning expected of them but are unable tomatch it [T]his discrepancy between is and should appears particularly often if theideals of a life community insist that it should be a complete community of meaning(23) From the evidence of his poetry we can gather that Hoccleve at least wished to ac-cept unquestioningly the traditional world view and just as certainly he-because thatworld view could not really account for him-was unable to match it in all his percep-tions and actions

23 Lollardy had spread rapidly in the City especially among the literate middle classwho now that their own economic failure was threatened resented more than ever thewealth of the Church (Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community 74) InterestinglyNightingale notes on the next page that Robert Chichele one of the aldermen of the Gro-cers Company when its ordinances were translated into English in 1418 commissionedHoccleve to translate a ballad into English This is the poem Furnivall calls An EnglishtBalade to the Virgin and Christ in Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Frederick J Furni-vall et al EETS es 61 and 73 (London Oxford University Press 1970) 67-72

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 185

with the official clerical attitude toward moneymaking In a profes-sion increasingly pervaded by money Privy Seal clerks such asRobert Frye became wealthy in part because they had no compunc-tions about influence-peddling or moneylending24 Perhaps becausehis attempts to make money in this manner failed more often thanthey succeeded-as he himself describes in the Regement of Princes(1499-547) where he complains that clerks are often cheated- out ofthe fee by which they are enticed to pen something favorable to aLord-Hoccleve chose to remain a traditionalist Hoccleve a clericin minor orders who kept up a hope for a benefice for at least tenand possibly twenty years or more responded to a personal and so-cial crisis of meaning by searching for what went wrong

The Idea of Money

Georg Simmel the great turn-of-the-century sociologist offers thefollowing formulation of the idea of money

Money is the representative of abstract value From the eco-nomic relationship ie the exchangeability of objects the factof this relationship is extracted and acquires in contrast tothose objects a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbolMoney is a specific realization of what is common to economicobjects25

From this he derives two important-and bipolar-corollaries Firstas the representation of value that is common to economic objectsmoney foregrounds the differential relativity of value ie the factthat rather than having intrinsic worth each object obtains valueonly in relation to all other objects a relation mediated by the com-mon measurement of price In Simmels words money

24 See Browns discussion of Frye (The Privy Seal Clerks 272-75) and Richardsonscomparison of Frye and Hoccleve (Hoccleve in His Social Context 314-21) as well asTout Chapters in the Administrative History on which both of the former two studies draw

25 Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Money trans Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (Lon-don Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1978) 120 Among alternative theoretical frameworks themost notable is Marxs whose formulation of money as the universal equivalent form issimilar to Simmels His notion of what constitutes economic value is however quite dif-fenmiddotnt See in Capital A Critique of Political Economy trans Ben Fowkes (HarmondsworthPenguin Books 1976) the first 75 pages or so and in Grundrisse Foundations of the Cri-tique of Political Economy trans Martin Nicolaus (New York Vintage Books 1973) thechapttT on money

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

186 Hoccleue and the Apprehension of Money

represents within the practical world the most certain imageand the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being ac-cording to which things receive their meaning through eachother and have their being determined by their mutual rela-tions (128)

Such relativity necessarily entails some degree of awareness of the in-stability or unfixedness of value as the worth of objects as measuredby price changes as the relationships among objects-and betweenobjects and money-change since the value of things has becomedetached from the objects and has acquired an independent exis-tence in a specific substance money can develop interests move-ments and norms that on occasion act contrary to those of thesymbolized objects (165) Second and conversely because moneyis the universal representation of economic value it appears to standabove values differential relativity

By sublimating the relativity of things money seems to avoidrelativity [M]oney as abstract value expresses nothing butthe relativity of things that constitute value and money asthe stable pole contrasts with eternal movements fluctuationsand equations of objects (121)

When apprehended in this manner money obtains the character ofa psychological absolute as llthe absolutely commensurate expres-sion and equivalent of all values money possesses a significant re-lationship to the notion of God (236) The danger here is thatmoney as an absolute means very easily becomes an absolute end-not the mediator of desired objects but the object of all desire

Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its qualityas a means to its convertibility into more definite values sothoroughly and unreservedly developed into a completelyengrossing final purpose governing our practical conscious-ness (232)

In this situation all objects index money rather than vice-versa andthe notion of money displaces God as the transcendental signified-a sin Hoccleve would have recognized as cupiditas26

26 Cf Marxs understanding of money as the lord and god of the world of commodi-ties (Grundrisse 221) For the echo of Derrida in my phrasing here see R A ShoafDante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word Money Images and Reference in Late Medieval

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 187

Whether or not we agree with Marx that the notion of greed is in-separable from the economic function of the money form it is cer-tainly the case that in the Middle Ages cupiditas was increasinglyseen as the most serious of the sins27 The Church of course hadmuch to say about this sin my specific concern here is with greedsrelationship to the clerical understanding of money the prominentfeature of which was the notion of just price For Aquinas whosereading of Aristotle was the point of departure for just price theoriststhroughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

[I]f either the price exceed the quantity of the things worthor conversely the thing exceed the price there is no longer theequality of justice and consequently to sell a thing for morethan its worth or to buy it for less than its worth is in itself un-just and unlawful 28

Such a rule of commerce depends obviously on the worth of athing being based on something other than price and for Aquinasthis extra-monetary referent is human need for which money is anumerical index But this one standard which truly measures allthings is demand This includes all commutable things inasmuch as

Poetry (Norman Okla Pilgrim Books 1983) Money is preeminently the meanswhich becomes an end Money is accumulated want without a referent able to refer toanything or nothing and therefore likely in the absence of anything else to refer to itself(241)

27 For Marxs argument see eg Grundrisse Money is therefore not only the objectbut also the fountainhead of greed (222) For one of the many discussions of greed inthe Middle Ages see Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages trans Rodney J Pay-ton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1996)25-27

28 Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica22 q 77 art 1 trans Fathers of the English Do-minican Province (New York Bezinger 1947) For a lucid discussion of just price theoriesthrough the thirteenth century see John W Baldwin The Medieval Theories of the JustPrice Romanists Canonists and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesTransactions of the American Philosophical Society49 (1959) 3-92 Of the three groups of the-orists Baldwin discusses the former two are fairly characterized as theorists of economicpractice while the latter may be described as theorists of economic ideology Since myconcern here is more with ideology than practice I take the theologians views as the me-dieval norm Also helpful in elucidating these views is Lester K Little Religious Poverty andthe Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1978) and espe-ciallYJoel Kaye Economy and Nature in theFourteenth Century (Cambridge Cambridge Uni-versity Press 1998) For a reading of Chaucers Shipmans Tale in light of the problematicbut nevertheless normative economic ideas Baldwin describes see Lee Patterson Chaucerand the Subject of Histary (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1991)349-65

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

188 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

everything has a reference to human need29 Although Aquinasrecognizes that the specific capacity to satisfy human need is not anabsolutely fixed quality of things-and this presents a theoreticalproblem inherited from Aristotle which he never fully resolves-itnevertheless ought to be determinable and relatively stable andthus prices in ajust world ought to reflect this determinacy and sta-bility Fluctuations in price although expected to some degree in-dicate a departure from the just norm a deviation from the idealmost likely motivated by cupiditas which in this regard is defined asthe desire simply to possess money rather than to use it to satisfy needHence Aquinas distinguishes between using money to satisfy theneeds of life and using it for profit which satisfies the greed forgain which knows no limit and tends to infinity 30Nicole Oresmethe fourteenth-century translator of Aristotle and author of De mon-eta (which was translated into English in the fifteenth century)makes much the same distinction in his description of money as ar-tificial riches in comparison to the natural riches of the com-modities it purchases any desire for purely monetary wealth istherefore vile and unnatural and stems from an individualsgreedy and disgraceful enhancement of his own profit31

I do not mean to imply here that the scholastic attempts to for-mulate a notion of just price represent an ignorance or oversimpli-cation of the nature of a money economy Rather Aquinass notionof just price represents as Joel Kaye has persuasively shown a so-phisticated attempt to reconcile the relativistic implications of amonetized economy with the traditional understanding of an onto-logically ordered universe of graded values where every object andsubject has its fixed place in the order of being from God down tothe least of his creations 32Yet on this topic Aquinass great pow-ers of synthesis do not entirely succeed Instead of forging an un-ambiguous link between divine justice and the dynamics of the

29 Aquinas Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 59981trans C 1 Litzinger (ChicagoHenry Regnery Company 1964)

30 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 431 The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents trans Charles Johnson

(London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1956)2542Oresme is specifically arguing hereagainst the profit-making activity of royal debasements of the coinage which he sees asworse than usury

32 Kaye Economy and Nature 50

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 175

throughout his poetry poetic self-consciousness cannot be separatedfrom the financial anxiety motivating his repeated turns toward the lit-erary petition More specifically-and as I argue in this essay-Hoccleves thematic obsessions and formal predilections betray a con-sciousness drenched in the problematic notion of money This preoc-cupation I contend reflects much more than the fact that he feels(like many of us) underpaid rather conflated with literary exchangein the very form of the petition the structure of monetary exchangeinfects his writing both thematically and formally and becomes thesource of a poetic anxiety that is also his poetic inspiration

In demonstrating this claim which involves charting the hypothet-ical contours of Hoccleves consciousness this essay works from out-side in4 In the opening two relatively brief sections I first describethe unusual salience of money in the general socioeconomic and po-litical context as well as in the London-Westminster civil servant com-munity to which Hoccleve belonged and I next formulate a model forthe early fifteenth-century idea of money by reading the normativeclerical understanding of this idea through the lens of more recenttheories In the final longer section I turn to three of Hoccleve sworks-touching again on La male regle before providing more exten-sive readings of the prologue to the Regement of Princes and of theSerie~to examine how Hoccleves anxious pecuniary brooding playsout in both the form and content of his poetry In the end I hope toshow that with the notion of money Hoccleve discovers a capaciousformal model and thematic vehicle expressive of both the reach of hisliterary vision and the paradox at the center of it

chapter on Hoccleve in Judith Ferster Fictions of Advice The Literature and Politics of Coun-sel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia University of Pennsylvania Press 1996) the sec-tion on Hoccleve in chapter 10 of Larry Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power TheMedieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge Cambridge University Press1994) which is a reworking of material previously published as The Kings Two VoicesNarrative and Power in Hoccleve s Regement of Princes in Literary Practice and Social Changein Britain 1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990)216--47 and] A Burrow The Poet as Petitioner SAC 3 (1981) 61-75

4 In charting Hoccleves consciousness I mean to take the first steps toward delineat-ing for an early fifteenth-eentury civil servant something akin to a phenomenology ofmoney For a much more detailed and wide-ranging account of a late medieval phenom-enology of exchange sec the forthcoming book by D Vance Smith (tentatively entitledArts of Possession The English Household Imaginary) in which he takes Piers Plowman to be acentral imaginative engagement with this phenomenology I thank Professor Smith for al-lowing me to preview mattTial from this book

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

176 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

The Experience of Money

A heuristically powerful but somewhat misleading way to ap-proach the general experience of money in late medieval England isto assume that this period represents an historical fulcrum thepoint of transition from feudalism to capitalism or the moment ofthe rise of the Inoney economy Yetwhile this transition and rise nodoubt did occur the nature of these changes continues to be a vex-ing problem Among economic historians there is no agreement onwhen they took place how long they took what their causes were oreven what precisely constitutes feudalism capitalism or a moneyeconomy5

In this essay then I assume only that the period from 1350 to1426 encompassing Hoccleves life and the preceding two decadeswas one of substantial socioeconomic (as well as political and reli-gious) turbulence6 In England the difficulties of the fourteenthcentury followed the boom of the thirteenth Prices then had beenrelatively stable because the supply and demand of goods had been

5 In regard to the late medieval andor early modern transition from feudalism to cap-italism see Christopher Dyer Were There Any Capitalists in Fifteenth-Century Englandin Enterprise and Individuals in Fifteenth-Century England ed Jennifer Kermode (StroudAlan Sutton 1991) 1-24 according to Dyer the 400 years between 1350 and 1750 can-not easily be described by means of the general labels available to us hence the cliche thatit was an age of transition (3) See also Rodney Hilton Class Conflict and the Crisis oFeu-dalism Essays in Medieval Social History (London Hambledon Press 1985) the collectedessays in Rodney Hilton ed The Transition from Feudalism and Capitalism (London NLB1976) especially the introductory essay by Hilton 9-30 Rj Holton The TransitionfromFeudalism to Capitalism (Houndmills MacMillan 1985) and Richard Lachmann FromManor to Market Structural Change in England 1536-1640 (Madison University ofWiscon-sin Press 1987) Similarly M M Postan The Rise of a Money Economy The EconomicHistory Review 14 (1944) 123-34 believes that the rise of the money economy was tem-porally and geographically discontinuous not so much a trend as a series of relativelyunique events

6 According to j A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve Some Redatings Review of EnglishStudies 46 (1995) 366-72 Hoccleve was born in 1366 or 1367 and died in 1426 Heworked as a clerk in the office of the Privy Seal from 1387 until shortly before his deathIn regard to the general economic trend of this period Francis Oakley The Medieval Ex-perience Foundations of Western Cultural Singularity (New York Charles Scribners Sons1974) writes that in the decades prior to Hoccleves birth population expansion hadceased serious and widespread famines had reappeared and the European economy hadbegun to slide into a financial crisis and a depression that was to last until the latter partof the fifteenth century (41) For a different view see A R Bridbury Economic GrowthEngland in theLater Middle Ages (London G Allen amp Unwin 1962) My use of the word tur-bulence here is meant to encompass local enclaves of prosperity as well as depression

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 177

relatively stable But in the decades following the Black Death thesituation changed dramatically prices for goods fell while wages forartisan and peasant labor rose7 Demesne farming became unprof-itable and landowners largely abandoned it the income they couldexpect from rents was not much better More and more labor serv-ices were commuted to wages furthering the erosion of non-mone-tary bonds between landowner and laborer and many of the latterwhether lawfully or not sold their labor to the highest bidder Therich-at least some of them-became poorer while some of thepoor became (a little) richer The Ordinance of Laborers of 1349the Statute of Laborers of 1351 and a series of sumptuary statutesbeginning in 1363 not to mention the outraged and anxious officialresponse to the rising of 1381 make it plain that this increased em-phasis on monetized labor was perceived as a fundamental threat tosocial order at least by those in power

In this very period England experienced a series of crises in itsmoney supply In the fourteenth century Harry Miskimin writesgold and silver mines failed largely because of technological obsta-cles bullion supplies were no longer sufficient [T]he govern-ment and principal citizens of England were acutely conscious ofa real shortage of money unrelieved by demographic financial orother factors8 Historians are still debating how much this shortagecontributed to the periods economic depression yet even thosewho believe its contribution to be marginal nevertheless attest to itsexistence as a problem well into the fifteenth century9 In an urbaneconomy in which the buying and selling of luxury goods played

7 For studies of the English economy following the Black Death see eg J L BoltonThe Medieval English Economy 1150-1500 (London Dent 1980) A R Bridbury The Eng-lish Economy from Bede to the Reformation (Woodbridge Suffolk Boydell Press 1992) JohnHatcher Plague Population and the English Economy 1348-1530 (London MacMillan1977) and especially R H Britnell The Commercialisation of English Society 1000-1500(Manchester Manchester University Press 1996)

8 Harry A Miskimin Monetary Movements and Market Structure Forces for Contrac-tion in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England Journal of Economic History 24 (1964)470-490 at 471-74

9 Eg [W]e find that the annual average output of coin from English mints plungeddramatically after the mid-fourteenth century and fell by a further 50 per cent comparing1350-1417 with 1418-60 and that frequent complaints were made about the shortage ofspecie by groups of merchants and tradesmen Moreover one notes that the periods oflowest mintings 1375-1407 and 1438-60 were also periods of lowest prices (HatcherPlague Population and the English Economy 474)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

178 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

such an important role-the preeminent example of which inearly fifteenth-century England was Hoccleves London andWestminster-a dearth of coin alongside the problematic combina-tion of rising wages and falling prices was no doubt felt acutely Thecoin shortage that began in the 1390s and reached a post-plague lowin 1417 hit the urban tradespeople hard as they saw their labor costsrise while the money supply and prices for goods felllO As Hoc-cleves complaint in the Regement of Princes about the scarsetee ofcoin suggests this shortage was no abstract economic problem butwas perceived at least by London dwellers as a concrete sign of trou-bled timesll At the same time London and Westminster continued

10 For a detailed discussion of the problems of one such group of tradespeople seePamela Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community The Grocers Company and the Politicsand Trade of London 1000-1485 (New Haven Yale University Press 1995)318-98 Britnell(The Commercialisation of English Society 182) describes this period roughly 1395-1417 asparticularly troublesome in regard to the English money supply-a period that certainlynot merely coincidentally covers most of Hocc1eves poetic career For an analysis of therelationship of the coin shortage and especially counterfeiting with Lollardy insurrec-tion and other contributors to Lancastrian political anxiety see the chapter entitledCounterfeiters Lollards and Lancastrian Unease in Paul Strohm Englands EmptyThrone Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399-1422 (New Haven Yale Univer-sity Press 1998) which is a revised version of an artic1e of the same title in New MedievalLiteratures 1 (1997) 31-58 According to Strohm the fourteenth and early fifteenth cen-turies in England did in fact represent a kind of historical fulcrum as they were the pointat which monarchs sought to exert their practical and symbolic authority over monetarycirculation requiring that gold function as monetary general equivalent only under thesign of their approval (Englands Empty Throne 151) If this was indeed the case then notonly money in general but also the semiotics of money in particular (which I discuss inthe next section of this essay) must have been unusually salient for Hocc1eve

11 This complaint is put into the mouth of Hocc1eves interlocutor the Old Man whoseapparently kind gesture of pecuniary selflessness is of course Hocc1eves humorous wayof expressing precisely the opposite

Than mighte silver walke more thikkeAmong the peple than that it dooth nowTher wolde I fayn that were yset the prikke-Nat for myself I shal do wel ynow-But sone for that swiche men as thowThat with the world wrastlen mighte han plenteeOf coyn whereas yee han now scarsetee

Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes ed Charles R Blyth (Kalamazoo Medieval InstitutePublications 1999) 52~32 All subsequent citations of this poem (RP) are from this edi-tion and are given in the text by line number In a few cases I have altered the punctuationI have also consulted Hoccleves warns The Regement of Princes and 14 of Hoccleves Minor Poemsed Frederick J Furnivall EETS es 72 (London Kegan Paul Trench amp Tnibner 1897)and for convenience I use Furnivalls more common spelling of the poems title

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 179

to be the national center of conspicuous consumption On his wayto work every morning Hoccleve could not have missed what Ger-vase Rosser describes as [t] he fashionable excesses of courtcouture-excesses that could only have been magnified by contrastsince as in todays New York City [l]ife in Westminster entailedconstant exposure to the extremes of wealth and poverty12Moneyor the lack of it was never far from the mind of a City dweller andfor many it no doubt loomed large in their perception of what waswrong with the world As one contemporary of Hoccleve complainsvisiting in turn everyone from the man of lawat Westminster to thebarge-man at Belyngsgate for lack ofmony I cold not spede13

The political situation of the early fifteenth century greatly exac-erbated-if not indeed produced-this perception At what was thegreatest political crisis of Hoccleves lifetime the deposition ofRichard II one of the principal charges against Richard was that hewas a poor money manager-in the words of one historian that hehad heedlessly squandered the revenues of the Crown on favouritesand had then been compelled to levyunwarranted taxes on his sub-jects 14That such an accusation could legitimate a deposition sug-gests not only that money was a prominent object of politicalconcern but also that its proper management was understood asfundamental to a healthy kingdom Such an understanding wouldin fact haunt Richards successor throughout his reign Henry IVsfinances as is well-known were a disaster He had less income thanRichard but greater expenses as he had obligations not only to his

12 Gervase Rosser Medieval Westminster 1200-1540 (Oxford Clarendon Press 1989)145225Britnell notes that Westminsters booming market for luxury goods was drivenby an exceptional concentration of expenditure by families in the upper income brack-ets (The Commercialisation of English Society 1000-1500 194)

13 This is one permutation of the refrain of London Lickpenny in Rossel Hope Robbinsed Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York Columbia University Press1959) 130-34 Although this poem is not about the general as much as one individualsshortage of coin the reliance of the London economy on the easy flow of money and thecorruption that is perceived as deriving therefrom is readily apparent in the poets vividcomplaint See also in the same volume the immediately following poem Money Money

14 G L Harriss Financial Policy in Henry V The Practice of Kingship ed G L Harris(Oxford Oxford University Press 1985) 159-79 at 160 In addition to this article in thisparagraph I rely on Christopher Allmand Henry V (London Methuen 1992) 384-403Chris Given-Wilson The Royal Household and the Kings Affinity (New Haven Yale UniversityPress 1986)76-141 and E FJacob The Fifteenth Century 1399-1485 (Oxford ClarendonPress 1961) 73-90

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

180 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

own supporters but to virtually all of Richards (whom he for obvi-ous reasons did not wish to alienate) as well as the costs of theWelsh rebellion and the keeping of a household that quickly becamejust as if not more lavish than his predecessors Not surprisinglythen from the beginning of Henry IVs reign the Commons washighly critical of his money management and-most relevant to mypurposes here-especially critical of his handling of annuities Thiscriticism cut two ways on the one hand Henry was seen as too gen-erous in granting annuities burdening the Crown revenue with alarge indefinite annual commitment on the other he was taken totask for being constantly behind in payments especially since manyof the recipients were in Parliament The problem was deemed im-portant enough that in his first Parliament Henry V was authorizedto reduce annuities by pound10000 and by 1421 he had cut them bypound12000 to about half the amount supported by his father Suchmeasures although by and large seen by historians as necessary andeffective could not but have been experienced by the recipients ofannuities-as we see in the case of Hoccleve-as a sign of the con-tinuing instability of the realm rather than its reinvigoration

Hoccleves specific place in this general socioeconomic and polit-ical context was as ambiguous as it was insecure As a petty civil ser-vant in the early fifteenth century he had no pre-established place inthe ideology of estates he was neither gentle nor (actively) clericalnor a laborer nor even a member of the ambiguous but well-estab-lished class of merchants Moreover although Michael Bennet claimsthat in general [p] oor clerks and minor court officials shared theworld of petty artisans and retailers Hoccleves standard of living atleast while he lived at Chesters Inn with his fellow Privy Seal clerkswas most likely more lavish than would be expected for one of his so-cioeconomic status15John Burrow in his extremely informative bio-bibliography of the poet refers to this Inn as a hostel 16 but it wasas the London house of the Bishop of Chester and the residence ofthe Keeper of the Privy Seal-who was after the Chancellor and theTreasurer the third most important minister of state-most likely

15 Michael Bennett Careerism in Late Medieval England in People Politics and Com-munity in the Later Middle Ages edJoel Rosenthal and Colin Richmond (Gloucester AlanSutton 1987) 19-39 at 32

16J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve (Aldershot Variorum 1994)7

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 181

more luxurious than that term now connotes From his study of thewill of john Prophete who was Keeper from 1406-15 A L Brownconcludes that the household that the Keeper maintained with hisclerks was quite elaborate Clearly Prophete and surely the otherkeepers also maintained a large household and it is not surprisingthat Hoccleve worried about the poor cot he would live in when heretired 17 Indeed several times in the Regement of Princes Hocclevemakes clear that his fear over the loss of his income is so powerfulprecisely because he is so used to a relatively luxurious life-see eglines 847967-73 and most explicitly 1220-23

I have had habundanceOf welfare ay and now stond in the plytOf scarsetee it were a greet penanceFor me-God sheelde me fro that streit chance

Living in a lavish household and in his work frequently coming intocontact with aristocrats and even members of the royal family Hoc-cleve had a taste of a gentlemans standard of living that belied hismore income-appropriate socioeconomic association with petty ar-tisans and retailers He knew both what it was like to live like an aris-tocrat and at the same time that such a life was in fact well beyondhis means

Lurking at the center of this ambiguity was for Hoccleve the in-escapable relation between money and his social location He wasentirely dependant on the Privy Seal for his livelihood and we knowfrom his own repeated references to the fact that the most crucialcomponent of this livelihood was his annuitee 18 A semiannual

17 A L Brown The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fifteenth Century in The Study ofMedieval Records Essays in Honor of Kathleen Major ed D A Ballough and R L Storey (Ox-ford Clarendon Press 1971)260-81 at 266 Browns conclusion that the clerks dwelt inthe Keepers household was an issue that T F Tout Chapters in the Administrative History ofMediaeval England The Wardrobe the Chamber and the Small Seals (Manchester University ofManchester Press 1930) left inconclusive In regard to the Privy Seal clerks generally in-flated socioeconomic status see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity the very same momentthat had witnessed a crisis of financial insecurity on the part of these clerks also seems tohave witnessed an elevation in their social position (364) For the economic role playedby the aristocratic inn during Hoccleves lifetime see Caroline M Barron Centres ofConspicuous Consumption The Aristocratic Town House in London 1200-1550 LondonJournal 20 (1995) 1-16

18 Eg Ill theschequeer he of his special grace Hath to me grauntid an annuitee Of tw(nti mark whyle I have lyves space (RP820-22)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

182 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

royal grant of a fixed amount this source of income had neither awages direct relation to labor and potential for negotiation nor abenefices long-term stability and independence from labor Thus initself socially ambiguous this source of income was nevertheless ashe himself vividly describes in La male regle the essential element ofHoccleves social identity

Wher was a gretter maister eek than ~Or bet aqweyntid at Westmynstre YateAmong the tauerneres namelyAnd cookes whan I cam eerly or lateI pynchid nat at hem in myn acateBut paied hem as pat they axe woldeWherfore I was the welcomere algateAnd for a verray gentil man yholde

Othir than maistir callid was I neuereAmong this meynee in myn audienceMe thoughte I was ymaad a man foreuereSo tikelid me pat nyce reuerencepat it me made largere of despenseThan pat I thoghte han been MR 177-206

His title of maister and his status as gentil depended not uponanything inherent in his position but upon the fact that he paiedthe tavern-keepers cooks and boatmen as pat they axe wolde Hisannuity made his social status bluntly quantifiable in economicterms he was precisely twenty marks worth of a maister 19 Cor-relatively this meant that being yrnaad a man was inseparable fromthe knowledge that such a monetarily propped status was self-consuming-that his title of maister required him to spend thevery money that produced it And what was even more central toHoccleves great anxiety the disbursement of the money that madepossible this status was utterly unpredictable it was always late often

19 In other words Hoccleves social status was perceived as directly proportional to themoney in his pocket This fact resonates with Hoccleves complaint in the Regement ofPrinces that his wit (or more precisely the wit he is recognized as possessing) is directlyproportional to his silver For althogh that myn heed undir myn hood Was neverewysyit whyl it with me stood So that I hadde silver resonable My lytil wit was sumwhatcovenable (1236-39)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 183

under threat of being suspended and on at least two occasions ap-parently not paid20

Given then both the real unpredictability and indeterminate so-cial status of his annuity an ambiguous social location whose tenu-ous elevation was based to a large degree on the fact that he hadsuch an income and the very public relationship between annuitiesin general and the troubles of his Lancastrian employers it is not atall surprising that Hoccleve s pervasive sense of his own and theworlds instability often seized on the idea of money as its imagina-tive vehicle As he laments in the Regement of Princes immediatelyafter revealing the source of his twenti mark income

Mighte I ay payd been of that dueteeIt sholde stonde weI ynow with meBut paiement is hard to gete adayesAnd that me putte in many foule affrayes RP 823-26

Hoccleves poetry of foule affrayes-ie his miserable distur-bances or fears hence his profound anxiety-derives from his ob-sessive concern with money in an historical context troubled ingeneral with money problems For Hoccleve money was not simplya financial instrument but the natural poetic vehicle for exploring aview of the world whose cracks and seams were beginning to show

Amidst the political social religious and economic unrest of theearly fifteenth century Hoccleve as poems such as the Remonstranceagainst Oldcastle suggest wanted to hold onto a traditional world vieweven though to do so meant seeing much of his world as corrupt Inthis regard Derek Pearsalls description of Langland holds as wellfor Hoccleve his response to the social realities he perceives is al-ways that of a devout Christian who sees all change and transforma-tion as a form of decay and who struggles to comprehend thenature of change within the structure of a traditional mode of

20 See J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 8-9 12-13 for a discussion of Hoccleves annuityas well as the appendix of this book (33-49) listing mentions of Hoccleve in the historicalrecord including each of his annuity payments For a similar reading of the maister pas-sage in La male regle see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity 364 Some critics finding thenumber and extent of Hoccleves financial complaints to belie the typicality and to out-weigh the real gravity of his situation show little sympathy for his obsession See for ex-ample Malcolm Richardson Hoccleve in His Social Context ChauR20 (1986) 313-22

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

184 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

thought 21 Hoccleve was in his struggle to understand his changingworld and his place within it experiencing what sociologists today calla crisis of meaning his own traditionalism did not seem to haveplace for someone in his position22 In this situation an individualmay either reject the reigning world view and search for alternativesor try to discover and even ameliorate what has gone wrong (I use in-dividual agency figuratively here crises of meaning and responses tothem are of course both psychological and social phenomena) Thetradespeople of London for readily apparent reasons frequentlychose the first strategy and in the early fifteenth century their het-erodoxy often took the form of Lollardy23 Such antitraditionalism al-though assuming a quite different form may also be observed amongHoccleves fellow clerks While far from being LOllards these clerksleveraged their novel professional situation to their own financial ben-efit demonstrating a nascent entrepreneurship quite out of keeping

21 Derek Pearsall Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman in Medieval English Stud-ies Presented to GeorgeKane ed Edward Donald Kennedy Ronald Waldron and Joseph SWittig (Wolfeboro NH DS Brewer 1988) 167-85 at 174-75 Strohms characterizationof Hoccleves orthodoxy is unequivocal his text everywhere announces its preferencefor the orthodox and the legitimate in their struggle against adulteration (EnglandsEmpty Throne 146) For a recent analysis of the Regement and the Remonstrance Against Old-castle that suggests how disturbingly clever Hoccleve could be at expressing this politicaland religious orthodoxy see Ruth Nisse Oure Fadres Olde and Modres GenderHeresy and Hocc1eves Literary Politics SAC21 (1999) 275-99

22 For a helpful discussion of this kind of personal and social crisis see Peter L Bergerand Thomas Luckmann Modernity Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning The Orientation ofModern Man (Giitersloh Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers 1995) The condition fora crisis of meaning is that the members of a particular life-community accept unques-tioningly the degree of coincidence of meaning expected of them but are unable tomatch it [T]his discrepancy between is and should appears particularly often if theideals of a life community insist that it should be a complete community of meaning(23) From the evidence of his poetry we can gather that Hoccleve at least wished to ac-cept unquestioningly the traditional world view and just as certainly he-because thatworld view could not really account for him-was unable to match it in all his percep-tions and actions

23 Lollardy had spread rapidly in the City especially among the literate middle classwho now that their own economic failure was threatened resented more than ever thewealth of the Church (Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community 74) InterestinglyNightingale notes on the next page that Robert Chichele one of the aldermen of the Gro-cers Company when its ordinances were translated into English in 1418 commissionedHoccleve to translate a ballad into English This is the poem Furnivall calls An EnglishtBalade to the Virgin and Christ in Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Frederick J Furni-vall et al EETS es 61 and 73 (London Oxford University Press 1970) 67-72

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 185

with the official clerical attitude toward moneymaking In a profes-sion increasingly pervaded by money Privy Seal clerks such asRobert Frye became wealthy in part because they had no compunc-tions about influence-peddling or moneylending24 Perhaps becausehis attempts to make money in this manner failed more often thanthey succeeded-as he himself describes in the Regement of Princes(1499-547) where he complains that clerks are often cheated- out ofthe fee by which they are enticed to pen something favorable to aLord-Hoccleve chose to remain a traditionalist Hoccleve a clericin minor orders who kept up a hope for a benefice for at least tenand possibly twenty years or more responded to a personal and so-cial crisis of meaning by searching for what went wrong

The Idea of Money

Georg Simmel the great turn-of-the-century sociologist offers thefollowing formulation of the idea of money

Money is the representative of abstract value From the eco-nomic relationship ie the exchangeability of objects the factof this relationship is extracted and acquires in contrast tothose objects a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbolMoney is a specific realization of what is common to economicobjects25

From this he derives two important-and bipolar-corollaries Firstas the representation of value that is common to economic objectsmoney foregrounds the differential relativity of value ie the factthat rather than having intrinsic worth each object obtains valueonly in relation to all other objects a relation mediated by the com-mon measurement of price In Simmels words money

24 See Browns discussion of Frye (The Privy Seal Clerks 272-75) and Richardsonscomparison of Frye and Hoccleve (Hoccleve in His Social Context 314-21) as well asTout Chapters in the Administrative History on which both of the former two studies draw

25 Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Money trans Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (Lon-don Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1978) 120 Among alternative theoretical frameworks themost notable is Marxs whose formulation of money as the universal equivalent form issimilar to Simmels His notion of what constitutes economic value is however quite dif-fenmiddotnt See in Capital A Critique of Political Economy trans Ben Fowkes (HarmondsworthPenguin Books 1976) the first 75 pages or so and in Grundrisse Foundations of the Cri-tique of Political Economy trans Martin Nicolaus (New York Vintage Books 1973) thechapttT on money

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

186 Hoccleue and the Apprehension of Money

represents within the practical world the most certain imageand the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being ac-cording to which things receive their meaning through eachother and have their being determined by their mutual rela-tions (128)

Such relativity necessarily entails some degree of awareness of the in-stability or unfixedness of value as the worth of objects as measuredby price changes as the relationships among objects-and betweenobjects and money-change since the value of things has becomedetached from the objects and has acquired an independent exis-tence in a specific substance money can develop interests move-ments and norms that on occasion act contrary to those of thesymbolized objects (165) Second and conversely because moneyis the universal representation of economic value it appears to standabove values differential relativity

By sublimating the relativity of things money seems to avoidrelativity [M]oney as abstract value expresses nothing butthe relativity of things that constitute value and money asthe stable pole contrasts with eternal movements fluctuationsand equations of objects (121)

When apprehended in this manner money obtains the character ofa psychological absolute as llthe absolutely commensurate expres-sion and equivalent of all values money possesses a significant re-lationship to the notion of God (236) The danger here is thatmoney as an absolute means very easily becomes an absolute end-not the mediator of desired objects but the object of all desire

Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its qualityas a means to its convertibility into more definite values sothoroughly and unreservedly developed into a completelyengrossing final purpose governing our practical conscious-ness (232)

In this situation all objects index money rather than vice-versa andthe notion of money displaces God as the transcendental signified-a sin Hoccleve would have recognized as cupiditas26

26 Cf Marxs understanding of money as the lord and god of the world of commodi-ties (Grundrisse 221) For the echo of Derrida in my phrasing here see R A ShoafDante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word Money Images and Reference in Late Medieval

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 187

Whether or not we agree with Marx that the notion of greed is in-separable from the economic function of the money form it is cer-tainly the case that in the Middle Ages cupiditas was increasinglyseen as the most serious of the sins27 The Church of course hadmuch to say about this sin my specific concern here is with greedsrelationship to the clerical understanding of money the prominentfeature of which was the notion of just price For Aquinas whosereading of Aristotle was the point of departure for just price theoriststhroughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

[I]f either the price exceed the quantity of the things worthor conversely the thing exceed the price there is no longer theequality of justice and consequently to sell a thing for morethan its worth or to buy it for less than its worth is in itself un-just and unlawful 28

Such a rule of commerce depends obviously on the worth of athing being based on something other than price and for Aquinasthis extra-monetary referent is human need for which money is anumerical index But this one standard which truly measures allthings is demand This includes all commutable things inasmuch as

Poetry (Norman Okla Pilgrim Books 1983) Money is preeminently the meanswhich becomes an end Money is accumulated want without a referent able to refer toanything or nothing and therefore likely in the absence of anything else to refer to itself(241)

27 For Marxs argument see eg Grundrisse Money is therefore not only the objectbut also the fountainhead of greed (222) For one of the many discussions of greed inthe Middle Ages see Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages trans Rodney J Pay-ton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1996)25-27

28 Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica22 q 77 art 1 trans Fathers of the English Do-minican Province (New York Bezinger 1947) For a lucid discussion of just price theoriesthrough the thirteenth century see John W Baldwin The Medieval Theories of the JustPrice Romanists Canonists and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesTransactions of the American Philosophical Society49 (1959) 3-92 Of the three groups of the-orists Baldwin discusses the former two are fairly characterized as theorists of economicpractice while the latter may be described as theorists of economic ideology Since myconcern here is more with ideology than practice I take the theologians views as the me-dieval norm Also helpful in elucidating these views is Lester K Little Religious Poverty andthe Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1978) and espe-ciallYJoel Kaye Economy and Nature in theFourteenth Century (Cambridge Cambridge Uni-versity Press 1998) For a reading of Chaucers Shipmans Tale in light of the problematicbut nevertheless normative economic ideas Baldwin describes see Lee Patterson Chaucerand the Subject of Histary (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1991)349-65

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

188 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

everything has a reference to human need29 Although Aquinasrecognizes that the specific capacity to satisfy human need is not anabsolutely fixed quality of things-and this presents a theoreticalproblem inherited from Aristotle which he never fully resolves-itnevertheless ought to be determinable and relatively stable andthus prices in ajust world ought to reflect this determinacy and sta-bility Fluctuations in price although expected to some degree in-dicate a departure from the just norm a deviation from the idealmost likely motivated by cupiditas which in this regard is defined asthe desire simply to possess money rather than to use it to satisfy needHence Aquinas distinguishes between using money to satisfy theneeds of life and using it for profit which satisfies the greed forgain which knows no limit and tends to infinity 30Nicole Oresmethe fourteenth-century translator of Aristotle and author of De mon-eta (which was translated into English in the fifteenth century)makes much the same distinction in his description of money as ar-tificial riches in comparison to the natural riches of the com-modities it purchases any desire for purely monetary wealth istherefore vile and unnatural and stems from an individualsgreedy and disgraceful enhancement of his own profit31

I do not mean to imply here that the scholastic attempts to for-mulate a notion of just price represent an ignorance or oversimpli-cation of the nature of a money economy Rather Aquinass notionof just price represents as Joel Kaye has persuasively shown a so-phisticated attempt to reconcile the relativistic implications of amonetized economy with the traditional understanding of an onto-logically ordered universe of graded values where every object andsubject has its fixed place in the order of being from God down tothe least of his creations 32Yet on this topic Aquinass great pow-ers of synthesis do not entirely succeed Instead of forging an un-ambiguous link between divine justice and the dynamics of the

29 Aquinas Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 59981trans C 1 Litzinger (ChicagoHenry Regnery Company 1964)

30 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 431 The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents trans Charles Johnson

(London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1956)2542Oresme is specifically arguing hereagainst the profit-making activity of royal debasements of the coinage which he sees asworse than usury

32 Kaye Economy and Nature 50

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

176 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

The Experience of Money

A heuristically powerful but somewhat misleading way to ap-proach the general experience of money in late medieval England isto assume that this period represents an historical fulcrum thepoint of transition from feudalism to capitalism or the moment ofthe rise of the Inoney economy Yetwhile this transition and rise nodoubt did occur the nature of these changes continues to be a vex-ing problem Among economic historians there is no agreement onwhen they took place how long they took what their causes were oreven what precisely constitutes feudalism capitalism or a moneyeconomy5

In this essay then I assume only that the period from 1350 to1426 encompassing Hoccleves life and the preceding two decadeswas one of substantial socioeconomic (as well as political and reli-gious) turbulence6 In England the difficulties of the fourteenthcentury followed the boom of the thirteenth Prices then had beenrelatively stable because the supply and demand of goods had been

5 In regard to the late medieval andor early modern transition from feudalism to cap-italism see Christopher Dyer Were There Any Capitalists in Fifteenth-Century Englandin Enterprise and Individuals in Fifteenth-Century England ed Jennifer Kermode (StroudAlan Sutton 1991) 1-24 according to Dyer the 400 years between 1350 and 1750 can-not easily be described by means of the general labels available to us hence the cliche thatit was an age of transition (3) See also Rodney Hilton Class Conflict and the Crisis oFeu-dalism Essays in Medieval Social History (London Hambledon Press 1985) the collectedessays in Rodney Hilton ed The Transition from Feudalism and Capitalism (London NLB1976) especially the introductory essay by Hilton 9-30 Rj Holton The TransitionfromFeudalism to Capitalism (Houndmills MacMillan 1985) and Richard Lachmann FromManor to Market Structural Change in England 1536-1640 (Madison University ofWiscon-sin Press 1987) Similarly M M Postan The Rise of a Money Economy The EconomicHistory Review 14 (1944) 123-34 believes that the rise of the money economy was tem-porally and geographically discontinuous not so much a trend as a series of relativelyunique events

6 According to j A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve Some Redatings Review of EnglishStudies 46 (1995) 366-72 Hoccleve was born in 1366 or 1367 and died in 1426 Heworked as a clerk in the office of the Privy Seal from 1387 until shortly before his deathIn regard to the general economic trend of this period Francis Oakley The Medieval Ex-perience Foundations of Western Cultural Singularity (New York Charles Scribners Sons1974) writes that in the decades prior to Hoccleves birth population expansion hadceased serious and widespread famines had reappeared and the European economy hadbegun to slide into a financial crisis and a depression that was to last until the latter partof the fifteenth century (41) For a different view see A R Bridbury Economic GrowthEngland in theLater Middle Ages (London G Allen amp Unwin 1962) My use of the word tur-bulence here is meant to encompass local enclaves of prosperity as well as depression

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 177

relatively stable But in the decades following the Black Death thesituation changed dramatically prices for goods fell while wages forartisan and peasant labor rose7 Demesne farming became unprof-itable and landowners largely abandoned it the income they couldexpect from rents was not much better More and more labor serv-ices were commuted to wages furthering the erosion of non-mone-tary bonds between landowner and laborer and many of the latterwhether lawfully or not sold their labor to the highest bidder Therich-at least some of them-became poorer while some of thepoor became (a little) richer The Ordinance of Laborers of 1349the Statute of Laborers of 1351 and a series of sumptuary statutesbeginning in 1363 not to mention the outraged and anxious officialresponse to the rising of 1381 make it plain that this increased em-phasis on monetized labor was perceived as a fundamental threat tosocial order at least by those in power

In this very period England experienced a series of crises in itsmoney supply In the fourteenth century Harry Miskimin writesgold and silver mines failed largely because of technological obsta-cles bullion supplies were no longer sufficient [T]he govern-ment and principal citizens of England were acutely conscious ofa real shortage of money unrelieved by demographic financial orother factors8 Historians are still debating how much this shortagecontributed to the periods economic depression yet even thosewho believe its contribution to be marginal nevertheless attest to itsexistence as a problem well into the fifteenth century9 In an urbaneconomy in which the buying and selling of luxury goods played

7 For studies of the English economy following the Black Death see eg J L BoltonThe Medieval English Economy 1150-1500 (London Dent 1980) A R Bridbury The Eng-lish Economy from Bede to the Reformation (Woodbridge Suffolk Boydell Press 1992) JohnHatcher Plague Population and the English Economy 1348-1530 (London MacMillan1977) and especially R H Britnell The Commercialisation of English Society 1000-1500(Manchester Manchester University Press 1996)

8 Harry A Miskimin Monetary Movements and Market Structure Forces for Contrac-tion in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England Journal of Economic History 24 (1964)470-490 at 471-74

9 Eg [W]e find that the annual average output of coin from English mints plungeddramatically after the mid-fourteenth century and fell by a further 50 per cent comparing1350-1417 with 1418-60 and that frequent complaints were made about the shortage ofspecie by groups of merchants and tradesmen Moreover one notes that the periods oflowest mintings 1375-1407 and 1438-60 were also periods of lowest prices (HatcherPlague Population and the English Economy 474)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

178 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

such an important role-the preeminent example of which inearly fifteenth-century England was Hoccleves London andWestminster-a dearth of coin alongside the problematic combina-tion of rising wages and falling prices was no doubt felt acutely Thecoin shortage that began in the 1390s and reached a post-plague lowin 1417 hit the urban tradespeople hard as they saw their labor costsrise while the money supply and prices for goods felllO As Hoc-cleves complaint in the Regement of Princes about the scarsetee ofcoin suggests this shortage was no abstract economic problem butwas perceived at least by London dwellers as a concrete sign of trou-bled timesll At the same time London and Westminster continued

10 For a detailed discussion of the problems of one such group of tradespeople seePamela Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community The Grocers Company and the Politicsand Trade of London 1000-1485 (New Haven Yale University Press 1995)318-98 Britnell(The Commercialisation of English Society 182) describes this period roughly 1395-1417 asparticularly troublesome in regard to the English money supply-a period that certainlynot merely coincidentally covers most of Hocc1eves poetic career For an analysis of therelationship of the coin shortage and especially counterfeiting with Lollardy insurrec-tion and other contributors to Lancastrian political anxiety see the chapter entitledCounterfeiters Lollards and Lancastrian Unease in Paul Strohm Englands EmptyThrone Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399-1422 (New Haven Yale Univer-sity Press 1998) which is a revised version of an artic1e of the same title in New MedievalLiteratures 1 (1997) 31-58 According to Strohm the fourteenth and early fifteenth cen-turies in England did in fact represent a kind of historical fulcrum as they were the pointat which monarchs sought to exert their practical and symbolic authority over monetarycirculation requiring that gold function as monetary general equivalent only under thesign of their approval (Englands Empty Throne 151) If this was indeed the case then notonly money in general but also the semiotics of money in particular (which I discuss inthe next section of this essay) must have been unusually salient for Hocc1eve

11 This complaint is put into the mouth of Hocc1eves interlocutor the Old Man whoseapparently kind gesture of pecuniary selflessness is of course Hocc1eves humorous wayof expressing precisely the opposite

Than mighte silver walke more thikkeAmong the peple than that it dooth nowTher wolde I fayn that were yset the prikke-Nat for myself I shal do wel ynow-But sone for that swiche men as thowThat with the world wrastlen mighte han plenteeOf coyn whereas yee han now scarsetee

Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes ed Charles R Blyth (Kalamazoo Medieval InstitutePublications 1999) 52~32 All subsequent citations of this poem (RP) are from this edi-tion and are given in the text by line number In a few cases I have altered the punctuationI have also consulted Hoccleves warns The Regement of Princes and 14 of Hoccleves Minor Poemsed Frederick J Furnivall EETS es 72 (London Kegan Paul Trench amp Tnibner 1897)and for convenience I use Furnivalls more common spelling of the poems title

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 179

to be the national center of conspicuous consumption On his wayto work every morning Hoccleve could not have missed what Ger-vase Rosser describes as [t] he fashionable excesses of courtcouture-excesses that could only have been magnified by contrastsince as in todays New York City [l]ife in Westminster entailedconstant exposure to the extremes of wealth and poverty12Moneyor the lack of it was never far from the mind of a City dweller andfor many it no doubt loomed large in their perception of what waswrong with the world As one contemporary of Hoccleve complainsvisiting in turn everyone from the man of lawat Westminster to thebarge-man at Belyngsgate for lack ofmony I cold not spede13

The political situation of the early fifteenth century greatly exac-erbated-if not indeed produced-this perception At what was thegreatest political crisis of Hoccleves lifetime the deposition ofRichard II one of the principal charges against Richard was that hewas a poor money manager-in the words of one historian that hehad heedlessly squandered the revenues of the Crown on favouritesand had then been compelled to levyunwarranted taxes on his sub-jects 14That such an accusation could legitimate a deposition sug-gests not only that money was a prominent object of politicalconcern but also that its proper management was understood asfundamental to a healthy kingdom Such an understanding wouldin fact haunt Richards successor throughout his reign Henry IVsfinances as is well-known were a disaster He had less income thanRichard but greater expenses as he had obligations not only to his

12 Gervase Rosser Medieval Westminster 1200-1540 (Oxford Clarendon Press 1989)145225Britnell notes that Westminsters booming market for luxury goods was drivenby an exceptional concentration of expenditure by families in the upper income brack-ets (The Commercialisation of English Society 1000-1500 194)

13 This is one permutation of the refrain of London Lickpenny in Rossel Hope Robbinsed Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York Columbia University Press1959) 130-34 Although this poem is not about the general as much as one individualsshortage of coin the reliance of the London economy on the easy flow of money and thecorruption that is perceived as deriving therefrom is readily apparent in the poets vividcomplaint See also in the same volume the immediately following poem Money Money

14 G L Harriss Financial Policy in Henry V The Practice of Kingship ed G L Harris(Oxford Oxford University Press 1985) 159-79 at 160 In addition to this article in thisparagraph I rely on Christopher Allmand Henry V (London Methuen 1992) 384-403Chris Given-Wilson The Royal Household and the Kings Affinity (New Haven Yale UniversityPress 1986)76-141 and E FJacob The Fifteenth Century 1399-1485 (Oxford ClarendonPress 1961) 73-90

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

180 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

own supporters but to virtually all of Richards (whom he for obvi-ous reasons did not wish to alienate) as well as the costs of theWelsh rebellion and the keeping of a household that quickly becamejust as if not more lavish than his predecessors Not surprisinglythen from the beginning of Henry IVs reign the Commons washighly critical of his money management and-most relevant to mypurposes here-especially critical of his handling of annuities Thiscriticism cut two ways on the one hand Henry was seen as too gen-erous in granting annuities burdening the Crown revenue with alarge indefinite annual commitment on the other he was taken totask for being constantly behind in payments especially since manyof the recipients were in Parliament The problem was deemed im-portant enough that in his first Parliament Henry V was authorizedto reduce annuities by pound10000 and by 1421 he had cut them bypound12000 to about half the amount supported by his father Suchmeasures although by and large seen by historians as necessary andeffective could not but have been experienced by the recipients ofannuities-as we see in the case of Hoccleve-as a sign of the con-tinuing instability of the realm rather than its reinvigoration

Hoccleves specific place in this general socioeconomic and polit-ical context was as ambiguous as it was insecure As a petty civil ser-vant in the early fifteenth century he had no pre-established place inthe ideology of estates he was neither gentle nor (actively) clericalnor a laborer nor even a member of the ambiguous but well-estab-lished class of merchants Moreover although Michael Bennet claimsthat in general [p] oor clerks and minor court officials shared theworld of petty artisans and retailers Hoccleves standard of living atleast while he lived at Chesters Inn with his fellow Privy Seal clerkswas most likely more lavish than would be expected for one of his so-cioeconomic status15John Burrow in his extremely informative bio-bibliography of the poet refers to this Inn as a hostel 16 but it wasas the London house of the Bishop of Chester and the residence ofthe Keeper of the Privy Seal-who was after the Chancellor and theTreasurer the third most important minister of state-most likely

15 Michael Bennett Careerism in Late Medieval England in People Politics and Com-munity in the Later Middle Ages edJoel Rosenthal and Colin Richmond (Gloucester AlanSutton 1987) 19-39 at 32

16J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve (Aldershot Variorum 1994)7

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 181

more luxurious than that term now connotes From his study of thewill of john Prophete who was Keeper from 1406-15 A L Brownconcludes that the household that the Keeper maintained with hisclerks was quite elaborate Clearly Prophete and surely the otherkeepers also maintained a large household and it is not surprisingthat Hoccleve worried about the poor cot he would live in when heretired 17 Indeed several times in the Regement of Princes Hocclevemakes clear that his fear over the loss of his income is so powerfulprecisely because he is so used to a relatively luxurious life-see eglines 847967-73 and most explicitly 1220-23

I have had habundanceOf welfare ay and now stond in the plytOf scarsetee it were a greet penanceFor me-God sheelde me fro that streit chance

Living in a lavish household and in his work frequently coming intocontact with aristocrats and even members of the royal family Hoc-cleve had a taste of a gentlemans standard of living that belied hismore income-appropriate socioeconomic association with petty ar-tisans and retailers He knew both what it was like to live like an aris-tocrat and at the same time that such a life was in fact well beyondhis means

Lurking at the center of this ambiguity was for Hoccleve the in-escapable relation between money and his social location He wasentirely dependant on the Privy Seal for his livelihood and we knowfrom his own repeated references to the fact that the most crucialcomponent of this livelihood was his annuitee 18 A semiannual

17 A L Brown The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fifteenth Century in The Study ofMedieval Records Essays in Honor of Kathleen Major ed D A Ballough and R L Storey (Ox-ford Clarendon Press 1971)260-81 at 266 Browns conclusion that the clerks dwelt inthe Keepers household was an issue that T F Tout Chapters in the Administrative History ofMediaeval England The Wardrobe the Chamber and the Small Seals (Manchester University ofManchester Press 1930) left inconclusive In regard to the Privy Seal clerks generally in-flated socioeconomic status see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity the very same momentthat had witnessed a crisis of financial insecurity on the part of these clerks also seems tohave witnessed an elevation in their social position (364) For the economic role playedby the aristocratic inn during Hoccleves lifetime see Caroline M Barron Centres ofConspicuous Consumption The Aristocratic Town House in London 1200-1550 LondonJournal 20 (1995) 1-16

18 Eg Ill theschequeer he of his special grace Hath to me grauntid an annuitee Of tw(nti mark whyle I have lyves space (RP820-22)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

182 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

royal grant of a fixed amount this source of income had neither awages direct relation to labor and potential for negotiation nor abenefices long-term stability and independence from labor Thus initself socially ambiguous this source of income was nevertheless ashe himself vividly describes in La male regle the essential element ofHoccleves social identity

Wher was a gretter maister eek than ~Or bet aqweyntid at Westmynstre YateAmong the tauerneres namelyAnd cookes whan I cam eerly or lateI pynchid nat at hem in myn acateBut paied hem as pat they axe woldeWherfore I was the welcomere algateAnd for a verray gentil man yholde

Othir than maistir callid was I neuereAmong this meynee in myn audienceMe thoughte I was ymaad a man foreuereSo tikelid me pat nyce reuerencepat it me made largere of despenseThan pat I thoghte han been MR 177-206

His title of maister and his status as gentil depended not uponanything inherent in his position but upon the fact that he paiedthe tavern-keepers cooks and boatmen as pat they axe wolde Hisannuity made his social status bluntly quantifiable in economicterms he was precisely twenty marks worth of a maister 19 Cor-relatively this meant that being yrnaad a man was inseparable fromthe knowledge that such a monetarily propped status was self-consuming-that his title of maister required him to spend thevery money that produced it And what was even more central toHoccleves great anxiety the disbursement of the money that madepossible this status was utterly unpredictable it was always late often

19 In other words Hoccleves social status was perceived as directly proportional to themoney in his pocket This fact resonates with Hoccleves complaint in the Regement ofPrinces that his wit (or more precisely the wit he is recognized as possessing) is directlyproportional to his silver For althogh that myn heed undir myn hood Was neverewysyit whyl it with me stood So that I hadde silver resonable My lytil wit was sumwhatcovenable (1236-39)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 183

under threat of being suspended and on at least two occasions ap-parently not paid20

Given then both the real unpredictability and indeterminate so-cial status of his annuity an ambiguous social location whose tenu-ous elevation was based to a large degree on the fact that he hadsuch an income and the very public relationship between annuitiesin general and the troubles of his Lancastrian employers it is not atall surprising that Hoccleve s pervasive sense of his own and theworlds instability often seized on the idea of money as its imagina-tive vehicle As he laments in the Regement of Princes immediatelyafter revealing the source of his twenti mark income

Mighte I ay payd been of that dueteeIt sholde stonde weI ynow with meBut paiement is hard to gete adayesAnd that me putte in many foule affrayes RP 823-26

Hoccleves poetry of foule affrayes-ie his miserable distur-bances or fears hence his profound anxiety-derives from his ob-sessive concern with money in an historical context troubled ingeneral with money problems For Hoccleve money was not simplya financial instrument but the natural poetic vehicle for exploring aview of the world whose cracks and seams were beginning to show

Amidst the political social religious and economic unrest of theearly fifteenth century Hoccleve as poems such as the Remonstranceagainst Oldcastle suggest wanted to hold onto a traditional world vieweven though to do so meant seeing much of his world as corrupt Inthis regard Derek Pearsalls description of Langland holds as wellfor Hoccleve his response to the social realities he perceives is al-ways that of a devout Christian who sees all change and transforma-tion as a form of decay and who struggles to comprehend thenature of change within the structure of a traditional mode of

20 See J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 8-9 12-13 for a discussion of Hoccleves annuityas well as the appendix of this book (33-49) listing mentions of Hoccleve in the historicalrecord including each of his annuity payments For a similar reading of the maister pas-sage in La male regle see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity 364 Some critics finding thenumber and extent of Hoccleves financial complaints to belie the typicality and to out-weigh the real gravity of his situation show little sympathy for his obsession See for ex-ample Malcolm Richardson Hoccleve in His Social Context ChauR20 (1986) 313-22

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

184 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

thought 21 Hoccleve was in his struggle to understand his changingworld and his place within it experiencing what sociologists today calla crisis of meaning his own traditionalism did not seem to haveplace for someone in his position22 In this situation an individualmay either reject the reigning world view and search for alternativesor try to discover and even ameliorate what has gone wrong (I use in-dividual agency figuratively here crises of meaning and responses tothem are of course both psychological and social phenomena) Thetradespeople of London for readily apparent reasons frequentlychose the first strategy and in the early fifteenth century their het-erodoxy often took the form of Lollardy23 Such antitraditionalism al-though assuming a quite different form may also be observed amongHoccleves fellow clerks While far from being LOllards these clerksleveraged their novel professional situation to their own financial ben-efit demonstrating a nascent entrepreneurship quite out of keeping

21 Derek Pearsall Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman in Medieval English Stud-ies Presented to GeorgeKane ed Edward Donald Kennedy Ronald Waldron and Joseph SWittig (Wolfeboro NH DS Brewer 1988) 167-85 at 174-75 Strohms characterizationof Hoccleves orthodoxy is unequivocal his text everywhere announces its preferencefor the orthodox and the legitimate in their struggle against adulteration (EnglandsEmpty Throne 146) For a recent analysis of the Regement and the Remonstrance Against Old-castle that suggests how disturbingly clever Hoccleve could be at expressing this politicaland religious orthodoxy see Ruth Nisse Oure Fadres Olde and Modres GenderHeresy and Hocc1eves Literary Politics SAC21 (1999) 275-99

22 For a helpful discussion of this kind of personal and social crisis see Peter L Bergerand Thomas Luckmann Modernity Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning The Orientation ofModern Man (Giitersloh Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers 1995) The condition fora crisis of meaning is that the members of a particular life-community accept unques-tioningly the degree of coincidence of meaning expected of them but are unable tomatch it [T]his discrepancy between is and should appears particularly often if theideals of a life community insist that it should be a complete community of meaning(23) From the evidence of his poetry we can gather that Hoccleve at least wished to ac-cept unquestioningly the traditional world view and just as certainly he-because thatworld view could not really account for him-was unable to match it in all his percep-tions and actions

23 Lollardy had spread rapidly in the City especially among the literate middle classwho now that their own economic failure was threatened resented more than ever thewealth of the Church (Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community 74) InterestinglyNightingale notes on the next page that Robert Chichele one of the aldermen of the Gro-cers Company when its ordinances were translated into English in 1418 commissionedHoccleve to translate a ballad into English This is the poem Furnivall calls An EnglishtBalade to the Virgin and Christ in Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Frederick J Furni-vall et al EETS es 61 and 73 (London Oxford University Press 1970) 67-72

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 185

with the official clerical attitude toward moneymaking In a profes-sion increasingly pervaded by money Privy Seal clerks such asRobert Frye became wealthy in part because they had no compunc-tions about influence-peddling or moneylending24 Perhaps becausehis attempts to make money in this manner failed more often thanthey succeeded-as he himself describes in the Regement of Princes(1499-547) where he complains that clerks are often cheated- out ofthe fee by which they are enticed to pen something favorable to aLord-Hoccleve chose to remain a traditionalist Hoccleve a clericin minor orders who kept up a hope for a benefice for at least tenand possibly twenty years or more responded to a personal and so-cial crisis of meaning by searching for what went wrong

The Idea of Money

Georg Simmel the great turn-of-the-century sociologist offers thefollowing formulation of the idea of money

Money is the representative of abstract value From the eco-nomic relationship ie the exchangeability of objects the factof this relationship is extracted and acquires in contrast tothose objects a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbolMoney is a specific realization of what is common to economicobjects25

From this he derives two important-and bipolar-corollaries Firstas the representation of value that is common to economic objectsmoney foregrounds the differential relativity of value ie the factthat rather than having intrinsic worth each object obtains valueonly in relation to all other objects a relation mediated by the com-mon measurement of price In Simmels words money

24 See Browns discussion of Frye (The Privy Seal Clerks 272-75) and Richardsonscomparison of Frye and Hoccleve (Hoccleve in His Social Context 314-21) as well asTout Chapters in the Administrative History on which both of the former two studies draw

25 Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Money trans Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (Lon-don Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1978) 120 Among alternative theoretical frameworks themost notable is Marxs whose formulation of money as the universal equivalent form issimilar to Simmels His notion of what constitutes economic value is however quite dif-fenmiddotnt See in Capital A Critique of Political Economy trans Ben Fowkes (HarmondsworthPenguin Books 1976) the first 75 pages or so and in Grundrisse Foundations of the Cri-tique of Political Economy trans Martin Nicolaus (New York Vintage Books 1973) thechapttT on money

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

186 Hoccleue and the Apprehension of Money

represents within the practical world the most certain imageand the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being ac-cording to which things receive their meaning through eachother and have their being determined by their mutual rela-tions (128)

Such relativity necessarily entails some degree of awareness of the in-stability or unfixedness of value as the worth of objects as measuredby price changes as the relationships among objects-and betweenobjects and money-change since the value of things has becomedetached from the objects and has acquired an independent exis-tence in a specific substance money can develop interests move-ments and norms that on occasion act contrary to those of thesymbolized objects (165) Second and conversely because moneyis the universal representation of economic value it appears to standabove values differential relativity

By sublimating the relativity of things money seems to avoidrelativity [M]oney as abstract value expresses nothing butthe relativity of things that constitute value and money asthe stable pole contrasts with eternal movements fluctuationsand equations of objects (121)

When apprehended in this manner money obtains the character ofa psychological absolute as llthe absolutely commensurate expres-sion and equivalent of all values money possesses a significant re-lationship to the notion of God (236) The danger here is thatmoney as an absolute means very easily becomes an absolute end-not the mediator of desired objects but the object of all desire

Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its qualityas a means to its convertibility into more definite values sothoroughly and unreservedly developed into a completelyengrossing final purpose governing our practical conscious-ness (232)

In this situation all objects index money rather than vice-versa andthe notion of money displaces God as the transcendental signified-a sin Hoccleve would have recognized as cupiditas26

26 Cf Marxs understanding of money as the lord and god of the world of commodi-ties (Grundrisse 221) For the echo of Derrida in my phrasing here see R A ShoafDante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word Money Images and Reference in Late Medieval

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 187

Whether or not we agree with Marx that the notion of greed is in-separable from the economic function of the money form it is cer-tainly the case that in the Middle Ages cupiditas was increasinglyseen as the most serious of the sins27 The Church of course hadmuch to say about this sin my specific concern here is with greedsrelationship to the clerical understanding of money the prominentfeature of which was the notion of just price For Aquinas whosereading of Aristotle was the point of departure for just price theoriststhroughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

[I]f either the price exceed the quantity of the things worthor conversely the thing exceed the price there is no longer theequality of justice and consequently to sell a thing for morethan its worth or to buy it for less than its worth is in itself un-just and unlawful 28

Such a rule of commerce depends obviously on the worth of athing being based on something other than price and for Aquinasthis extra-monetary referent is human need for which money is anumerical index But this one standard which truly measures allthings is demand This includes all commutable things inasmuch as

Poetry (Norman Okla Pilgrim Books 1983) Money is preeminently the meanswhich becomes an end Money is accumulated want without a referent able to refer toanything or nothing and therefore likely in the absence of anything else to refer to itself(241)

27 For Marxs argument see eg Grundrisse Money is therefore not only the objectbut also the fountainhead of greed (222) For one of the many discussions of greed inthe Middle Ages see Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages trans Rodney J Pay-ton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1996)25-27

28 Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica22 q 77 art 1 trans Fathers of the English Do-minican Province (New York Bezinger 1947) For a lucid discussion of just price theoriesthrough the thirteenth century see John W Baldwin The Medieval Theories of the JustPrice Romanists Canonists and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesTransactions of the American Philosophical Society49 (1959) 3-92 Of the three groups of the-orists Baldwin discusses the former two are fairly characterized as theorists of economicpractice while the latter may be described as theorists of economic ideology Since myconcern here is more with ideology than practice I take the theologians views as the me-dieval norm Also helpful in elucidating these views is Lester K Little Religious Poverty andthe Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1978) and espe-ciallYJoel Kaye Economy and Nature in theFourteenth Century (Cambridge Cambridge Uni-versity Press 1998) For a reading of Chaucers Shipmans Tale in light of the problematicbut nevertheless normative economic ideas Baldwin describes see Lee Patterson Chaucerand the Subject of Histary (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1991)349-65

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

188 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

everything has a reference to human need29 Although Aquinasrecognizes that the specific capacity to satisfy human need is not anabsolutely fixed quality of things-and this presents a theoreticalproblem inherited from Aristotle which he never fully resolves-itnevertheless ought to be determinable and relatively stable andthus prices in ajust world ought to reflect this determinacy and sta-bility Fluctuations in price although expected to some degree in-dicate a departure from the just norm a deviation from the idealmost likely motivated by cupiditas which in this regard is defined asthe desire simply to possess money rather than to use it to satisfy needHence Aquinas distinguishes between using money to satisfy theneeds of life and using it for profit which satisfies the greed forgain which knows no limit and tends to infinity 30Nicole Oresmethe fourteenth-century translator of Aristotle and author of De mon-eta (which was translated into English in the fifteenth century)makes much the same distinction in his description of money as ar-tificial riches in comparison to the natural riches of the com-modities it purchases any desire for purely monetary wealth istherefore vile and unnatural and stems from an individualsgreedy and disgraceful enhancement of his own profit31

I do not mean to imply here that the scholastic attempts to for-mulate a notion of just price represent an ignorance or oversimpli-cation of the nature of a money economy Rather Aquinass notionof just price represents as Joel Kaye has persuasively shown a so-phisticated attempt to reconcile the relativistic implications of amonetized economy with the traditional understanding of an onto-logically ordered universe of graded values where every object andsubject has its fixed place in the order of being from God down tothe least of his creations 32Yet on this topic Aquinass great pow-ers of synthesis do not entirely succeed Instead of forging an un-ambiguous link between divine justice and the dynamics of the

29 Aquinas Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 59981trans C 1 Litzinger (ChicagoHenry Regnery Company 1964)

30 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 431 The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents trans Charles Johnson

(London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1956)2542Oresme is specifically arguing hereagainst the profit-making activity of royal debasements of the coinage which he sees asworse than usury

32 Kaye Economy and Nature 50

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 177

relatively stable But in the decades following the Black Death thesituation changed dramatically prices for goods fell while wages forartisan and peasant labor rose7 Demesne farming became unprof-itable and landowners largely abandoned it the income they couldexpect from rents was not much better More and more labor serv-ices were commuted to wages furthering the erosion of non-mone-tary bonds between landowner and laborer and many of the latterwhether lawfully or not sold their labor to the highest bidder Therich-at least some of them-became poorer while some of thepoor became (a little) richer The Ordinance of Laborers of 1349the Statute of Laborers of 1351 and a series of sumptuary statutesbeginning in 1363 not to mention the outraged and anxious officialresponse to the rising of 1381 make it plain that this increased em-phasis on monetized labor was perceived as a fundamental threat tosocial order at least by those in power

In this very period England experienced a series of crises in itsmoney supply In the fourteenth century Harry Miskimin writesgold and silver mines failed largely because of technological obsta-cles bullion supplies were no longer sufficient [T]he govern-ment and principal citizens of England were acutely conscious ofa real shortage of money unrelieved by demographic financial orother factors8 Historians are still debating how much this shortagecontributed to the periods economic depression yet even thosewho believe its contribution to be marginal nevertheless attest to itsexistence as a problem well into the fifteenth century9 In an urbaneconomy in which the buying and selling of luxury goods played

7 For studies of the English economy following the Black Death see eg J L BoltonThe Medieval English Economy 1150-1500 (London Dent 1980) A R Bridbury The Eng-lish Economy from Bede to the Reformation (Woodbridge Suffolk Boydell Press 1992) JohnHatcher Plague Population and the English Economy 1348-1530 (London MacMillan1977) and especially R H Britnell The Commercialisation of English Society 1000-1500(Manchester Manchester University Press 1996)

8 Harry A Miskimin Monetary Movements and Market Structure Forces for Contrac-tion in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England Journal of Economic History 24 (1964)470-490 at 471-74

9 Eg [W]e find that the annual average output of coin from English mints plungeddramatically after the mid-fourteenth century and fell by a further 50 per cent comparing1350-1417 with 1418-60 and that frequent complaints were made about the shortage ofspecie by groups of merchants and tradesmen Moreover one notes that the periods oflowest mintings 1375-1407 and 1438-60 were also periods of lowest prices (HatcherPlague Population and the English Economy 474)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

178 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

such an important role-the preeminent example of which inearly fifteenth-century England was Hoccleves London andWestminster-a dearth of coin alongside the problematic combina-tion of rising wages and falling prices was no doubt felt acutely Thecoin shortage that began in the 1390s and reached a post-plague lowin 1417 hit the urban tradespeople hard as they saw their labor costsrise while the money supply and prices for goods felllO As Hoc-cleves complaint in the Regement of Princes about the scarsetee ofcoin suggests this shortage was no abstract economic problem butwas perceived at least by London dwellers as a concrete sign of trou-bled timesll At the same time London and Westminster continued

10 For a detailed discussion of the problems of one such group of tradespeople seePamela Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community The Grocers Company and the Politicsand Trade of London 1000-1485 (New Haven Yale University Press 1995)318-98 Britnell(The Commercialisation of English Society 182) describes this period roughly 1395-1417 asparticularly troublesome in regard to the English money supply-a period that certainlynot merely coincidentally covers most of Hocc1eves poetic career For an analysis of therelationship of the coin shortage and especially counterfeiting with Lollardy insurrec-tion and other contributors to Lancastrian political anxiety see the chapter entitledCounterfeiters Lollards and Lancastrian Unease in Paul Strohm Englands EmptyThrone Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399-1422 (New Haven Yale Univer-sity Press 1998) which is a revised version of an artic1e of the same title in New MedievalLiteratures 1 (1997) 31-58 According to Strohm the fourteenth and early fifteenth cen-turies in England did in fact represent a kind of historical fulcrum as they were the pointat which monarchs sought to exert their practical and symbolic authority over monetarycirculation requiring that gold function as monetary general equivalent only under thesign of their approval (Englands Empty Throne 151) If this was indeed the case then notonly money in general but also the semiotics of money in particular (which I discuss inthe next section of this essay) must have been unusually salient for Hocc1eve

11 This complaint is put into the mouth of Hocc1eves interlocutor the Old Man whoseapparently kind gesture of pecuniary selflessness is of course Hocc1eves humorous wayof expressing precisely the opposite

Than mighte silver walke more thikkeAmong the peple than that it dooth nowTher wolde I fayn that were yset the prikke-Nat for myself I shal do wel ynow-But sone for that swiche men as thowThat with the world wrastlen mighte han plenteeOf coyn whereas yee han now scarsetee

Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes ed Charles R Blyth (Kalamazoo Medieval InstitutePublications 1999) 52~32 All subsequent citations of this poem (RP) are from this edi-tion and are given in the text by line number In a few cases I have altered the punctuationI have also consulted Hoccleves warns The Regement of Princes and 14 of Hoccleves Minor Poemsed Frederick J Furnivall EETS es 72 (London Kegan Paul Trench amp Tnibner 1897)and for convenience I use Furnivalls more common spelling of the poems title

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 179

to be the national center of conspicuous consumption On his wayto work every morning Hoccleve could not have missed what Ger-vase Rosser describes as [t] he fashionable excesses of courtcouture-excesses that could only have been magnified by contrastsince as in todays New York City [l]ife in Westminster entailedconstant exposure to the extremes of wealth and poverty12Moneyor the lack of it was never far from the mind of a City dweller andfor many it no doubt loomed large in their perception of what waswrong with the world As one contemporary of Hoccleve complainsvisiting in turn everyone from the man of lawat Westminster to thebarge-man at Belyngsgate for lack ofmony I cold not spede13

The political situation of the early fifteenth century greatly exac-erbated-if not indeed produced-this perception At what was thegreatest political crisis of Hoccleves lifetime the deposition ofRichard II one of the principal charges against Richard was that hewas a poor money manager-in the words of one historian that hehad heedlessly squandered the revenues of the Crown on favouritesand had then been compelled to levyunwarranted taxes on his sub-jects 14That such an accusation could legitimate a deposition sug-gests not only that money was a prominent object of politicalconcern but also that its proper management was understood asfundamental to a healthy kingdom Such an understanding wouldin fact haunt Richards successor throughout his reign Henry IVsfinances as is well-known were a disaster He had less income thanRichard but greater expenses as he had obligations not only to his

12 Gervase Rosser Medieval Westminster 1200-1540 (Oxford Clarendon Press 1989)145225Britnell notes that Westminsters booming market for luxury goods was drivenby an exceptional concentration of expenditure by families in the upper income brack-ets (The Commercialisation of English Society 1000-1500 194)

13 This is one permutation of the refrain of London Lickpenny in Rossel Hope Robbinsed Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York Columbia University Press1959) 130-34 Although this poem is not about the general as much as one individualsshortage of coin the reliance of the London economy on the easy flow of money and thecorruption that is perceived as deriving therefrom is readily apparent in the poets vividcomplaint See also in the same volume the immediately following poem Money Money

14 G L Harriss Financial Policy in Henry V The Practice of Kingship ed G L Harris(Oxford Oxford University Press 1985) 159-79 at 160 In addition to this article in thisparagraph I rely on Christopher Allmand Henry V (London Methuen 1992) 384-403Chris Given-Wilson The Royal Household and the Kings Affinity (New Haven Yale UniversityPress 1986)76-141 and E FJacob The Fifteenth Century 1399-1485 (Oxford ClarendonPress 1961) 73-90

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

180 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

own supporters but to virtually all of Richards (whom he for obvi-ous reasons did not wish to alienate) as well as the costs of theWelsh rebellion and the keeping of a household that quickly becamejust as if not more lavish than his predecessors Not surprisinglythen from the beginning of Henry IVs reign the Commons washighly critical of his money management and-most relevant to mypurposes here-especially critical of his handling of annuities Thiscriticism cut two ways on the one hand Henry was seen as too gen-erous in granting annuities burdening the Crown revenue with alarge indefinite annual commitment on the other he was taken totask for being constantly behind in payments especially since manyof the recipients were in Parliament The problem was deemed im-portant enough that in his first Parliament Henry V was authorizedto reduce annuities by pound10000 and by 1421 he had cut them bypound12000 to about half the amount supported by his father Suchmeasures although by and large seen by historians as necessary andeffective could not but have been experienced by the recipients ofannuities-as we see in the case of Hoccleve-as a sign of the con-tinuing instability of the realm rather than its reinvigoration

Hoccleves specific place in this general socioeconomic and polit-ical context was as ambiguous as it was insecure As a petty civil ser-vant in the early fifteenth century he had no pre-established place inthe ideology of estates he was neither gentle nor (actively) clericalnor a laborer nor even a member of the ambiguous but well-estab-lished class of merchants Moreover although Michael Bennet claimsthat in general [p] oor clerks and minor court officials shared theworld of petty artisans and retailers Hoccleves standard of living atleast while he lived at Chesters Inn with his fellow Privy Seal clerkswas most likely more lavish than would be expected for one of his so-cioeconomic status15John Burrow in his extremely informative bio-bibliography of the poet refers to this Inn as a hostel 16 but it wasas the London house of the Bishop of Chester and the residence ofthe Keeper of the Privy Seal-who was after the Chancellor and theTreasurer the third most important minister of state-most likely

15 Michael Bennett Careerism in Late Medieval England in People Politics and Com-munity in the Later Middle Ages edJoel Rosenthal and Colin Richmond (Gloucester AlanSutton 1987) 19-39 at 32

16J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve (Aldershot Variorum 1994)7

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 181

more luxurious than that term now connotes From his study of thewill of john Prophete who was Keeper from 1406-15 A L Brownconcludes that the household that the Keeper maintained with hisclerks was quite elaborate Clearly Prophete and surely the otherkeepers also maintained a large household and it is not surprisingthat Hoccleve worried about the poor cot he would live in when heretired 17 Indeed several times in the Regement of Princes Hocclevemakes clear that his fear over the loss of his income is so powerfulprecisely because he is so used to a relatively luxurious life-see eglines 847967-73 and most explicitly 1220-23

I have had habundanceOf welfare ay and now stond in the plytOf scarsetee it were a greet penanceFor me-God sheelde me fro that streit chance

Living in a lavish household and in his work frequently coming intocontact with aristocrats and even members of the royal family Hoc-cleve had a taste of a gentlemans standard of living that belied hismore income-appropriate socioeconomic association with petty ar-tisans and retailers He knew both what it was like to live like an aris-tocrat and at the same time that such a life was in fact well beyondhis means

Lurking at the center of this ambiguity was for Hoccleve the in-escapable relation between money and his social location He wasentirely dependant on the Privy Seal for his livelihood and we knowfrom his own repeated references to the fact that the most crucialcomponent of this livelihood was his annuitee 18 A semiannual

17 A L Brown The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fifteenth Century in The Study ofMedieval Records Essays in Honor of Kathleen Major ed D A Ballough and R L Storey (Ox-ford Clarendon Press 1971)260-81 at 266 Browns conclusion that the clerks dwelt inthe Keepers household was an issue that T F Tout Chapters in the Administrative History ofMediaeval England The Wardrobe the Chamber and the Small Seals (Manchester University ofManchester Press 1930) left inconclusive In regard to the Privy Seal clerks generally in-flated socioeconomic status see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity the very same momentthat had witnessed a crisis of financial insecurity on the part of these clerks also seems tohave witnessed an elevation in their social position (364) For the economic role playedby the aristocratic inn during Hoccleves lifetime see Caroline M Barron Centres ofConspicuous Consumption The Aristocratic Town House in London 1200-1550 LondonJournal 20 (1995) 1-16

18 Eg Ill theschequeer he of his special grace Hath to me grauntid an annuitee Of tw(nti mark whyle I have lyves space (RP820-22)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

182 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

royal grant of a fixed amount this source of income had neither awages direct relation to labor and potential for negotiation nor abenefices long-term stability and independence from labor Thus initself socially ambiguous this source of income was nevertheless ashe himself vividly describes in La male regle the essential element ofHoccleves social identity

Wher was a gretter maister eek than ~Or bet aqweyntid at Westmynstre YateAmong the tauerneres namelyAnd cookes whan I cam eerly or lateI pynchid nat at hem in myn acateBut paied hem as pat they axe woldeWherfore I was the welcomere algateAnd for a verray gentil man yholde

Othir than maistir callid was I neuereAmong this meynee in myn audienceMe thoughte I was ymaad a man foreuereSo tikelid me pat nyce reuerencepat it me made largere of despenseThan pat I thoghte han been MR 177-206

His title of maister and his status as gentil depended not uponanything inherent in his position but upon the fact that he paiedthe tavern-keepers cooks and boatmen as pat they axe wolde Hisannuity made his social status bluntly quantifiable in economicterms he was precisely twenty marks worth of a maister 19 Cor-relatively this meant that being yrnaad a man was inseparable fromthe knowledge that such a monetarily propped status was self-consuming-that his title of maister required him to spend thevery money that produced it And what was even more central toHoccleves great anxiety the disbursement of the money that madepossible this status was utterly unpredictable it was always late often

19 In other words Hoccleves social status was perceived as directly proportional to themoney in his pocket This fact resonates with Hoccleves complaint in the Regement ofPrinces that his wit (or more precisely the wit he is recognized as possessing) is directlyproportional to his silver For althogh that myn heed undir myn hood Was neverewysyit whyl it with me stood So that I hadde silver resonable My lytil wit was sumwhatcovenable (1236-39)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 183

under threat of being suspended and on at least two occasions ap-parently not paid20

Given then both the real unpredictability and indeterminate so-cial status of his annuity an ambiguous social location whose tenu-ous elevation was based to a large degree on the fact that he hadsuch an income and the very public relationship between annuitiesin general and the troubles of his Lancastrian employers it is not atall surprising that Hoccleve s pervasive sense of his own and theworlds instability often seized on the idea of money as its imagina-tive vehicle As he laments in the Regement of Princes immediatelyafter revealing the source of his twenti mark income

Mighte I ay payd been of that dueteeIt sholde stonde weI ynow with meBut paiement is hard to gete adayesAnd that me putte in many foule affrayes RP 823-26

Hoccleves poetry of foule affrayes-ie his miserable distur-bances or fears hence his profound anxiety-derives from his ob-sessive concern with money in an historical context troubled ingeneral with money problems For Hoccleve money was not simplya financial instrument but the natural poetic vehicle for exploring aview of the world whose cracks and seams were beginning to show

Amidst the political social religious and economic unrest of theearly fifteenth century Hoccleve as poems such as the Remonstranceagainst Oldcastle suggest wanted to hold onto a traditional world vieweven though to do so meant seeing much of his world as corrupt Inthis regard Derek Pearsalls description of Langland holds as wellfor Hoccleve his response to the social realities he perceives is al-ways that of a devout Christian who sees all change and transforma-tion as a form of decay and who struggles to comprehend thenature of change within the structure of a traditional mode of

20 See J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 8-9 12-13 for a discussion of Hoccleves annuityas well as the appendix of this book (33-49) listing mentions of Hoccleve in the historicalrecord including each of his annuity payments For a similar reading of the maister pas-sage in La male regle see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity 364 Some critics finding thenumber and extent of Hoccleves financial complaints to belie the typicality and to out-weigh the real gravity of his situation show little sympathy for his obsession See for ex-ample Malcolm Richardson Hoccleve in His Social Context ChauR20 (1986) 313-22

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

184 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

thought 21 Hoccleve was in his struggle to understand his changingworld and his place within it experiencing what sociologists today calla crisis of meaning his own traditionalism did not seem to haveplace for someone in his position22 In this situation an individualmay either reject the reigning world view and search for alternativesor try to discover and even ameliorate what has gone wrong (I use in-dividual agency figuratively here crises of meaning and responses tothem are of course both psychological and social phenomena) Thetradespeople of London for readily apparent reasons frequentlychose the first strategy and in the early fifteenth century their het-erodoxy often took the form of Lollardy23 Such antitraditionalism al-though assuming a quite different form may also be observed amongHoccleves fellow clerks While far from being LOllards these clerksleveraged their novel professional situation to their own financial ben-efit demonstrating a nascent entrepreneurship quite out of keeping

21 Derek Pearsall Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman in Medieval English Stud-ies Presented to GeorgeKane ed Edward Donald Kennedy Ronald Waldron and Joseph SWittig (Wolfeboro NH DS Brewer 1988) 167-85 at 174-75 Strohms characterizationof Hoccleves orthodoxy is unequivocal his text everywhere announces its preferencefor the orthodox and the legitimate in their struggle against adulteration (EnglandsEmpty Throne 146) For a recent analysis of the Regement and the Remonstrance Against Old-castle that suggests how disturbingly clever Hoccleve could be at expressing this politicaland religious orthodoxy see Ruth Nisse Oure Fadres Olde and Modres GenderHeresy and Hocc1eves Literary Politics SAC21 (1999) 275-99

22 For a helpful discussion of this kind of personal and social crisis see Peter L Bergerand Thomas Luckmann Modernity Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning The Orientation ofModern Man (Giitersloh Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers 1995) The condition fora crisis of meaning is that the members of a particular life-community accept unques-tioningly the degree of coincidence of meaning expected of them but are unable tomatch it [T]his discrepancy between is and should appears particularly often if theideals of a life community insist that it should be a complete community of meaning(23) From the evidence of his poetry we can gather that Hoccleve at least wished to ac-cept unquestioningly the traditional world view and just as certainly he-because thatworld view could not really account for him-was unable to match it in all his percep-tions and actions

23 Lollardy had spread rapidly in the City especially among the literate middle classwho now that their own economic failure was threatened resented more than ever thewealth of the Church (Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community 74) InterestinglyNightingale notes on the next page that Robert Chichele one of the aldermen of the Gro-cers Company when its ordinances were translated into English in 1418 commissionedHoccleve to translate a ballad into English This is the poem Furnivall calls An EnglishtBalade to the Virgin and Christ in Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Frederick J Furni-vall et al EETS es 61 and 73 (London Oxford University Press 1970) 67-72

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 185

with the official clerical attitude toward moneymaking In a profes-sion increasingly pervaded by money Privy Seal clerks such asRobert Frye became wealthy in part because they had no compunc-tions about influence-peddling or moneylending24 Perhaps becausehis attempts to make money in this manner failed more often thanthey succeeded-as he himself describes in the Regement of Princes(1499-547) where he complains that clerks are often cheated- out ofthe fee by which they are enticed to pen something favorable to aLord-Hoccleve chose to remain a traditionalist Hoccleve a clericin minor orders who kept up a hope for a benefice for at least tenand possibly twenty years or more responded to a personal and so-cial crisis of meaning by searching for what went wrong

The Idea of Money

Georg Simmel the great turn-of-the-century sociologist offers thefollowing formulation of the idea of money

Money is the representative of abstract value From the eco-nomic relationship ie the exchangeability of objects the factof this relationship is extracted and acquires in contrast tothose objects a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbolMoney is a specific realization of what is common to economicobjects25

From this he derives two important-and bipolar-corollaries Firstas the representation of value that is common to economic objectsmoney foregrounds the differential relativity of value ie the factthat rather than having intrinsic worth each object obtains valueonly in relation to all other objects a relation mediated by the com-mon measurement of price In Simmels words money

24 See Browns discussion of Frye (The Privy Seal Clerks 272-75) and Richardsonscomparison of Frye and Hoccleve (Hoccleve in His Social Context 314-21) as well asTout Chapters in the Administrative History on which both of the former two studies draw

25 Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Money trans Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (Lon-don Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1978) 120 Among alternative theoretical frameworks themost notable is Marxs whose formulation of money as the universal equivalent form issimilar to Simmels His notion of what constitutes economic value is however quite dif-fenmiddotnt See in Capital A Critique of Political Economy trans Ben Fowkes (HarmondsworthPenguin Books 1976) the first 75 pages or so and in Grundrisse Foundations of the Cri-tique of Political Economy trans Martin Nicolaus (New York Vintage Books 1973) thechapttT on money

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

186 Hoccleue and the Apprehension of Money

represents within the practical world the most certain imageand the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being ac-cording to which things receive their meaning through eachother and have their being determined by their mutual rela-tions (128)

Such relativity necessarily entails some degree of awareness of the in-stability or unfixedness of value as the worth of objects as measuredby price changes as the relationships among objects-and betweenobjects and money-change since the value of things has becomedetached from the objects and has acquired an independent exis-tence in a specific substance money can develop interests move-ments and norms that on occasion act contrary to those of thesymbolized objects (165) Second and conversely because moneyis the universal representation of economic value it appears to standabove values differential relativity

By sublimating the relativity of things money seems to avoidrelativity [M]oney as abstract value expresses nothing butthe relativity of things that constitute value and money asthe stable pole contrasts with eternal movements fluctuationsand equations of objects (121)

When apprehended in this manner money obtains the character ofa psychological absolute as llthe absolutely commensurate expres-sion and equivalent of all values money possesses a significant re-lationship to the notion of God (236) The danger here is thatmoney as an absolute means very easily becomes an absolute end-not the mediator of desired objects but the object of all desire

Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its qualityas a means to its convertibility into more definite values sothoroughly and unreservedly developed into a completelyengrossing final purpose governing our practical conscious-ness (232)

In this situation all objects index money rather than vice-versa andthe notion of money displaces God as the transcendental signified-a sin Hoccleve would have recognized as cupiditas26

26 Cf Marxs understanding of money as the lord and god of the world of commodi-ties (Grundrisse 221) For the echo of Derrida in my phrasing here see R A ShoafDante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word Money Images and Reference in Late Medieval

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 187

Whether or not we agree with Marx that the notion of greed is in-separable from the economic function of the money form it is cer-tainly the case that in the Middle Ages cupiditas was increasinglyseen as the most serious of the sins27 The Church of course hadmuch to say about this sin my specific concern here is with greedsrelationship to the clerical understanding of money the prominentfeature of which was the notion of just price For Aquinas whosereading of Aristotle was the point of departure for just price theoriststhroughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

[I]f either the price exceed the quantity of the things worthor conversely the thing exceed the price there is no longer theequality of justice and consequently to sell a thing for morethan its worth or to buy it for less than its worth is in itself un-just and unlawful 28

Such a rule of commerce depends obviously on the worth of athing being based on something other than price and for Aquinasthis extra-monetary referent is human need for which money is anumerical index But this one standard which truly measures allthings is demand This includes all commutable things inasmuch as

Poetry (Norman Okla Pilgrim Books 1983) Money is preeminently the meanswhich becomes an end Money is accumulated want without a referent able to refer toanything or nothing and therefore likely in the absence of anything else to refer to itself(241)

27 For Marxs argument see eg Grundrisse Money is therefore not only the objectbut also the fountainhead of greed (222) For one of the many discussions of greed inthe Middle Ages see Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages trans Rodney J Pay-ton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1996)25-27

28 Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica22 q 77 art 1 trans Fathers of the English Do-minican Province (New York Bezinger 1947) For a lucid discussion of just price theoriesthrough the thirteenth century see John W Baldwin The Medieval Theories of the JustPrice Romanists Canonists and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesTransactions of the American Philosophical Society49 (1959) 3-92 Of the three groups of the-orists Baldwin discusses the former two are fairly characterized as theorists of economicpractice while the latter may be described as theorists of economic ideology Since myconcern here is more with ideology than practice I take the theologians views as the me-dieval norm Also helpful in elucidating these views is Lester K Little Religious Poverty andthe Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1978) and espe-ciallYJoel Kaye Economy and Nature in theFourteenth Century (Cambridge Cambridge Uni-versity Press 1998) For a reading of Chaucers Shipmans Tale in light of the problematicbut nevertheless normative economic ideas Baldwin describes see Lee Patterson Chaucerand the Subject of Histary (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1991)349-65

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

188 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

everything has a reference to human need29 Although Aquinasrecognizes that the specific capacity to satisfy human need is not anabsolutely fixed quality of things-and this presents a theoreticalproblem inherited from Aristotle which he never fully resolves-itnevertheless ought to be determinable and relatively stable andthus prices in ajust world ought to reflect this determinacy and sta-bility Fluctuations in price although expected to some degree in-dicate a departure from the just norm a deviation from the idealmost likely motivated by cupiditas which in this regard is defined asthe desire simply to possess money rather than to use it to satisfy needHence Aquinas distinguishes between using money to satisfy theneeds of life and using it for profit which satisfies the greed forgain which knows no limit and tends to infinity 30Nicole Oresmethe fourteenth-century translator of Aristotle and author of De mon-eta (which was translated into English in the fifteenth century)makes much the same distinction in his description of money as ar-tificial riches in comparison to the natural riches of the com-modities it purchases any desire for purely monetary wealth istherefore vile and unnatural and stems from an individualsgreedy and disgraceful enhancement of his own profit31

I do not mean to imply here that the scholastic attempts to for-mulate a notion of just price represent an ignorance or oversimpli-cation of the nature of a money economy Rather Aquinass notionof just price represents as Joel Kaye has persuasively shown a so-phisticated attempt to reconcile the relativistic implications of amonetized economy with the traditional understanding of an onto-logically ordered universe of graded values where every object andsubject has its fixed place in the order of being from God down tothe least of his creations 32Yet on this topic Aquinass great pow-ers of synthesis do not entirely succeed Instead of forging an un-ambiguous link between divine justice and the dynamics of the

29 Aquinas Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 59981trans C 1 Litzinger (ChicagoHenry Regnery Company 1964)

30 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 431 The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents trans Charles Johnson

(London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1956)2542Oresme is specifically arguing hereagainst the profit-making activity of royal debasements of the coinage which he sees asworse than usury

32 Kaye Economy and Nature 50

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

178 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

such an important role-the preeminent example of which inearly fifteenth-century England was Hoccleves London andWestminster-a dearth of coin alongside the problematic combina-tion of rising wages and falling prices was no doubt felt acutely Thecoin shortage that began in the 1390s and reached a post-plague lowin 1417 hit the urban tradespeople hard as they saw their labor costsrise while the money supply and prices for goods felllO As Hoc-cleves complaint in the Regement of Princes about the scarsetee ofcoin suggests this shortage was no abstract economic problem butwas perceived at least by London dwellers as a concrete sign of trou-bled timesll At the same time London and Westminster continued

10 For a detailed discussion of the problems of one such group of tradespeople seePamela Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community The Grocers Company and the Politicsand Trade of London 1000-1485 (New Haven Yale University Press 1995)318-98 Britnell(The Commercialisation of English Society 182) describes this period roughly 1395-1417 asparticularly troublesome in regard to the English money supply-a period that certainlynot merely coincidentally covers most of Hocc1eves poetic career For an analysis of therelationship of the coin shortage and especially counterfeiting with Lollardy insurrec-tion and other contributors to Lancastrian political anxiety see the chapter entitledCounterfeiters Lollards and Lancastrian Unease in Paul Strohm Englands EmptyThrone Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399-1422 (New Haven Yale Univer-sity Press 1998) which is a revised version of an artic1e of the same title in New MedievalLiteratures 1 (1997) 31-58 According to Strohm the fourteenth and early fifteenth cen-turies in England did in fact represent a kind of historical fulcrum as they were the pointat which monarchs sought to exert their practical and symbolic authority over monetarycirculation requiring that gold function as monetary general equivalent only under thesign of their approval (Englands Empty Throne 151) If this was indeed the case then notonly money in general but also the semiotics of money in particular (which I discuss inthe next section of this essay) must have been unusually salient for Hocc1eve

11 This complaint is put into the mouth of Hocc1eves interlocutor the Old Man whoseapparently kind gesture of pecuniary selflessness is of course Hocc1eves humorous wayof expressing precisely the opposite

Than mighte silver walke more thikkeAmong the peple than that it dooth nowTher wolde I fayn that were yset the prikke-Nat for myself I shal do wel ynow-But sone for that swiche men as thowThat with the world wrastlen mighte han plenteeOf coyn whereas yee han now scarsetee

Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes ed Charles R Blyth (Kalamazoo Medieval InstitutePublications 1999) 52~32 All subsequent citations of this poem (RP) are from this edi-tion and are given in the text by line number In a few cases I have altered the punctuationI have also consulted Hoccleves warns The Regement of Princes and 14 of Hoccleves Minor Poemsed Frederick J Furnivall EETS es 72 (London Kegan Paul Trench amp Tnibner 1897)and for convenience I use Furnivalls more common spelling of the poems title

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 179

to be the national center of conspicuous consumption On his wayto work every morning Hoccleve could not have missed what Ger-vase Rosser describes as [t] he fashionable excesses of courtcouture-excesses that could only have been magnified by contrastsince as in todays New York City [l]ife in Westminster entailedconstant exposure to the extremes of wealth and poverty12Moneyor the lack of it was never far from the mind of a City dweller andfor many it no doubt loomed large in their perception of what waswrong with the world As one contemporary of Hoccleve complainsvisiting in turn everyone from the man of lawat Westminster to thebarge-man at Belyngsgate for lack ofmony I cold not spede13

The political situation of the early fifteenth century greatly exac-erbated-if not indeed produced-this perception At what was thegreatest political crisis of Hoccleves lifetime the deposition ofRichard II one of the principal charges against Richard was that hewas a poor money manager-in the words of one historian that hehad heedlessly squandered the revenues of the Crown on favouritesand had then been compelled to levyunwarranted taxes on his sub-jects 14That such an accusation could legitimate a deposition sug-gests not only that money was a prominent object of politicalconcern but also that its proper management was understood asfundamental to a healthy kingdom Such an understanding wouldin fact haunt Richards successor throughout his reign Henry IVsfinances as is well-known were a disaster He had less income thanRichard but greater expenses as he had obligations not only to his

12 Gervase Rosser Medieval Westminster 1200-1540 (Oxford Clarendon Press 1989)145225Britnell notes that Westminsters booming market for luxury goods was drivenby an exceptional concentration of expenditure by families in the upper income brack-ets (The Commercialisation of English Society 1000-1500 194)

13 This is one permutation of the refrain of London Lickpenny in Rossel Hope Robbinsed Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York Columbia University Press1959) 130-34 Although this poem is not about the general as much as one individualsshortage of coin the reliance of the London economy on the easy flow of money and thecorruption that is perceived as deriving therefrom is readily apparent in the poets vividcomplaint See also in the same volume the immediately following poem Money Money

14 G L Harriss Financial Policy in Henry V The Practice of Kingship ed G L Harris(Oxford Oxford University Press 1985) 159-79 at 160 In addition to this article in thisparagraph I rely on Christopher Allmand Henry V (London Methuen 1992) 384-403Chris Given-Wilson The Royal Household and the Kings Affinity (New Haven Yale UniversityPress 1986)76-141 and E FJacob The Fifteenth Century 1399-1485 (Oxford ClarendonPress 1961) 73-90

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

180 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

own supporters but to virtually all of Richards (whom he for obvi-ous reasons did not wish to alienate) as well as the costs of theWelsh rebellion and the keeping of a household that quickly becamejust as if not more lavish than his predecessors Not surprisinglythen from the beginning of Henry IVs reign the Commons washighly critical of his money management and-most relevant to mypurposes here-especially critical of his handling of annuities Thiscriticism cut two ways on the one hand Henry was seen as too gen-erous in granting annuities burdening the Crown revenue with alarge indefinite annual commitment on the other he was taken totask for being constantly behind in payments especially since manyof the recipients were in Parliament The problem was deemed im-portant enough that in his first Parliament Henry V was authorizedto reduce annuities by pound10000 and by 1421 he had cut them bypound12000 to about half the amount supported by his father Suchmeasures although by and large seen by historians as necessary andeffective could not but have been experienced by the recipients ofannuities-as we see in the case of Hoccleve-as a sign of the con-tinuing instability of the realm rather than its reinvigoration

Hoccleves specific place in this general socioeconomic and polit-ical context was as ambiguous as it was insecure As a petty civil ser-vant in the early fifteenth century he had no pre-established place inthe ideology of estates he was neither gentle nor (actively) clericalnor a laborer nor even a member of the ambiguous but well-estab-lished class of merchants Moreover although Michael Bennet claimsthat in general [p] oor clerks and minor court officials shared theworld of petty artisans and retailers Hoccleves standard of living atleast while he lived at Chesters Inn with his fellow Privy Seal clerkswas most likely more lavish than would be expected for one of his so-cioeconomic status15John Burrow in his extremely informative bio-bibliography of the poet refers to this Inn as a hostel 16 but it wasas the London house of the Bishop of Chester and the residence ofthe Keeper of the Privy Seal-who was after the Chancellor and theTreasurer the third most important minister of state-most likely

15 Michael Bennett Careerism in Late Medieval England in People Politics and Com-munity in the Later Middle Ages edJoel Rosenthal and Colin Richmond (Gloucester AlanSutton 1987) 19-39 at 32

16J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve (Aldershot Variorum 1994)7

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 181

more luxurious than that term now connotes From his study of thewill of john Prophete who was Keeper from 1406-15 A L Brownconcludes that the household that the Keeper maintained with hisclerks was quite elaborate Clearly Prophete and surely the otherkeepers also maintained a large household and it is not surprisingthat Hoccleve worried about the poor cot he would live in when heretired 17 Indeed several times in the Regement of Princes Hocclevemakes clear that his fear over the loss of his income is so powerfulprecisely because he is so used to a relatively luxurious life-see eglines 847967-73 and most explicitly 1220-23

I have had habundanceOf welfare ay and now stond in the plytOf scarsetee it were a greet penanceFor me-God sheelde me fro that streit chance

Living in a lavish household and in his work frequently coming intocontact with aristocrats and even members of the royal family Hoc-cleve had a taste of a gentlemans standard of living that belied hismore income-appropriate socioeconomic association with petty ar-tisans and retailers He knew both what it was like to live like an aris-tocrat and at the same time that such a life was in fact well beyondhis means

Lurking at the center of this ambiguity was for Hoccleve the in-escapable relation between money and his social location He wasentirely dependant on the Privy Seal for his livelihood and we knowfrom his own repeated references to the fact that the most crucialcomponent of this livelihood was his annuitee 18 A semiannual

17 A L Brown The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fifteenth Century in The Study ofMedieval Records Essays in Honor of Kathleen Major ed D A Ballough and R L Storey (Ox-ford Clarendon Press 1971)260-81 at 266 Browns conclusion that the clerks dwelt inthe Keepers household was an issue that T F Tout Chapters in the Administrative History ofMediaeval England The Wardrobe the Chamber and the Small Seals (Manchester University ofManchester Press 1930) left inconclusive In regard to the Privy Seal clerks generally in-flated socioeconomic status see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity the very same momentthat had witnessed a crisis of financial insecurity on the part of these clerks also seems tohave witnessed an elevation in their social position (364) For the economic role playedby the aristocratic inn during Hoccleves lifetime see Caroline M Barron Centres ofConspicuous Consumption The Aristocratic Town House in London 1200-1550 LondonJournal 20 (1995) 1-16

18 Eg Ill theschequeer he of his special grace Hath to me grauntid an annuitee Of tw(nti mark whyle I have lyves space (RP820-22)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

182 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

royal grant of a fixed amount this source of income had neither awages direct relation to labor and potential for negotiation nor abenefices long-term stability and independence from labor Thus initself socially ambiguous this source of income was nevertheless ashe himself vividly describes in La male regle the essential element ofHoccleves social identity

Wher was a gretter maister eek than ~Or bet aqweyntid at Westmynstre YateAmong the tauerneres namelyAnd cookes whan I cam eerly or lateI pynchid nat at hem in myn acateBut paied hem as pat they axe woldeWherfore I was the welcomere algateAnd for a verray gentil man yholde

Othir than maistir callid was I neuereAmong this meynee in myn audienceMe thoughte I was ymaad a man foreuereSo tikelid me pat nyce reuerencepat it me made largere of despenseThan pat I thoghte han been MR 177-206

His title of maister and his status as gentil depended not uponanything inherent in his position but upon the fact that he paiedthe tavern-keepers cooks and boatmen as pat they axe wolde Hisannuity made his social status bluntly quantifiable in economicterms he was precisely twenty marks worth of a maister 19 Cor-relatively this meant that being yrnaad a man was inseparable fromthe knowledge that such a monetarily propped status was self-consuming-that his title of maister required him to spend thevery money that produced it And what was even more central toHoccleves great anxiety the disbursement of the money that madepossible this status was utterly unpredictable it was always late often

19 In other words Hoccleves social status was perceived as directly proportional to themoney in his pocket This fact resonates with Hoccleves complaint in the Regement ofPrinces that his wit (or more precisely the wit he is recognized as possessing) is directlyproportional to his silver For althogh that myn heed undir myn hood Was neverewysyit whyl it with me stood So that I hadde silver resonable My lytil wit was sumwhatcovenable (1236-39)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 183

under threat of being suspended and on at least two occasions ap-parently not paid20

Given then both the real unpredictability and indeterminate so-cial status of his annuity an ambiguous social location whose tenu-ous elevation was based to a large degree on the fact that he hadsuch an income and the very public relationship between annuitiesin general and the troubles of his Lancastrian employers it is not atall surprising that Hoccleve s pervasive sense of his own and theworlds instability often seized on the idea of money as its imagina-tive vehicle As he laments in the Regement of Princes immediatelyafter revealing the source of his twenti mark income

Mighte I ay payd been of that dueteeIt sholde stonde weI ynow with meBut paiement is hard to gete adayesAnd that me putte in many foule affrayes RP 823-26

Hoccleves poetry of foule affrayes-ie his miserable distur-bances or fears hence his profound anxiety-derives from his ob-sessive concern with money in an historical context troubled ingeneral with money problems For Hoccleve money was not simplya financial instrument but the natural poetic vehicle for exploring aview of the world whose cracks and seams were beginning to show

Amidst the political social religious and economic unrest of theearly fifteenth century Hoccleve as poems such as the Remonstranceagainst Oldcastle suggest wanted to hold onto a traditional world vieweven though to do so meant seeing much of his world as corrupt Inthis regard Derek Pearsalls description of Langland holds as wellfor Hoccleve his response to the social realities he perceives is al-ways that of a devout Christian who sees all change and transforma-tion as a form of decay and who struggles to comprehend thenature of change within the structure of a traditional mode of

20 See J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 8-9 12-13 for a discussion of Hoccleves annuityas well as the appendix of this book (33-49) listing mentions of Hoccleve in the historicalrecord including each of his annuity payments For a similar reading of the maister pas-sage in La male regle see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity 364 Some critics finding thenumber and extent of Hoccleves financial complaints to belie the typicality and to out-weigh the real gravity of his situation show little sympathy for his obsession See for ex-ample Malcolm Richardson Hoccleve in His Social Context ChauR20 (1986) 313-22

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

184 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

thought 21 Hoccleve was in his struggle to understand his changingworld and his place within it experiencing what sociologists today calla crisis of meaning his own traditionalism did not seem to haveplace for someone in his position22 In this situation an individualmay either reject the reigning world view and search for alternativesor try to discover and even ameliorate what has gone wrong (I use in-dividual agency figuratively here crises of meaning and responses tothem are of course both psychological and social phenomena) Thetradespeople of London for readily apparent reasons frequentlychose the first strategy and in the early fifteenth century their het-erodoxy often took the form of Lollardy23 Such antitraditionalism al-though assuming a quite different form may also be observed amongHoccleves fellow clerks While far from being LOllards these clerksleveraged their novel professional situation to their own financial ben-efit demonstrating a nascent entrepreneurship quite out of keeping

21 Derek Pearsall Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman in Medieval English Stud-ies Presented to GeorgeKane ed Edward Donald Kennedy Ronald Waldron and Joseph SWittig (Wolfeboro NH DS Brewer 1988) 167-85 at 174-75 Strohms characterizationof Hoccleves orthodoxy is unequivocal his text everywhere announces its preferencefor the orthodox and the legitimate in their struggle against adulteration (EnglandsEmpty Throne 146) For a recent analysis of the Regement and the Remonstrance Against Old-castle that suggests how disturbingly clever Hoccleve could be at expressing this politicaland religious orthodoxy see Ruth Nisse Oure Fadres Olde and Modres GenderHeresy and Hocc1eves Literary Politics SAC21 (1999) 275-99

22 For a helpful discussion of this kind of personal and social crisis see Peter L Bergerand Thomas Luckmann Modernity Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning The Orientation ofModern Man (Giitersloh Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers 1995) The condition fora crisis of meaning is that the members of a particular life-community accept unques-tioningly the degree of coincidence of meaning expected of them but are unable tomatch it [T]his discrepancy between is and should appears particularly often if theideals of a life community insist that it should be a complete community of meaning(23) From the evidence of his poetry we can gather that Hoccleve at least wished to ac-cept unquestioningly the traditional world view and just as certainly he-because thatworld view could not really account for him-was unable to match it in all his percep-tions and actions

23 Lollardy had spread rapidly in the City especially among the literate middle classwho now that their own economic failure was threatened resented more than ever thewealth of the Church (Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community 74) InterestinglyNightingale notes on the next page that Robert Chichele one of the aldermen of the Gro-cers Company when its ordinances were translated into English in 1418 commissionedHoccleve to translate a ballad into English This is the poem Furnivall calls An EnglishtBalade to the Virgin and Christ in Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Frederick J Furni-vall et al EETS es 61 and 73 (London Oxford University Press 1970) 67-72

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 185

with the official clerical attitude toward moneymaking In a profes-sion increasingly pervaded by money Privy Seal clerks such asRobert Frye became wealthy in part because they had no compunc-tions about influence-peddling or moneylending24 Perhaps becausehis attempts to make money in this manner failed more often thanthey succeeded-as he himself describes in the Regement of Princes(1499-547) where he complains that clerks are often cheated- out ofthe fee by which they are enticed to pen something favorable to aLord-Hoccleve chose to remain a traditionalist Hoccleve a clericin minor orders who kept up a hope for a benefice for at least tenand possibly twenty years or more responded to a personal and so-cial crisis of meaning by searching for what went wrong

The Idea of Money

Georg Simmel the great turn-of-the-century sociologist offers thefollowing formulation of the idea of money

Money is the representative of abstract value From the eco-nomic relationship ie the exchangeability of objects the factof this relationship is extracted and acquires in contrast tothose objects a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbolMoney is a specific realization of what is common to economicobjects25

From this he derives two important-and bipolar-corollaries Firstas the representation of value that is common to economic objectsmoney foregrounds the differential relativity of value ie the factthat rather than having intrinsic worth each object obtains valueonly in relation to all other objects a relation mediated by the com-mon measurement of price In Simmels words money

24 See Browns discussion of Frye (The Privy Seal Clerks 272-75) and Richardsonscomparison of Frye and Hoccleve (Hoccleve in His Social Context 314-21) as well asTout Chapters in the Administrative History on which both of the former two studies draw

25 Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Money trans Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (Lon-don Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1978) 120 Among alternative theoretical frameworks themost notable is Marxs whose formulation of money as the universal equivalent form issimilar to Simmels His notion of what constitutes economic value is however quite dif-fenmiddotnt See in Capital A Critique of Political Economy trans Ben Fowkes (HarmondsworthPenguin Books 1976) the first 75 pages or so and in Grundrisse Foundations of the Cri-tique of Political Economy trans Martin Nicolaus (New York Vintage Books 1973) thechapttT on money

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

186 Hoccleue and the Apprehension of Money

represents within the practical world the most certain imageand the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being ac-cording to which things receive their meaning through eachother and have their being determined by their mutual rela-tions (128)

Such relativity necessarily entails some degree of awareness of the in-stability or unfixedness of value as the worth of objects as measuredby price changes as the relationships among objects-and betweenobjects and money-change since the value of things has becomedetached from the objects and has acquired an independent exis-tence in a specific substance money can develop interests move-ments and norms that on occasion act contrary to those of thesymbolized objects (165) Second and conversely because moneyis the universal representation of economic value it appears to standabove values differential relativity

By sublimating the relativity of things money seems to avoidrelativity [M]oney as abstract value expresses nothing butthe relativity of things that constitute value and money asthe stable pole contrasts with eternal movements fluctuationsand equations of objects (121)

When apprehended in this manner money obtains the character ofa psychological absolute as llthe absolutely commensurate expres-sion and equivalent of all values money possesses a significant re-lationship to the notion of God (236) The danger here is thatmoney as an absolute means very easily becomes an absolute end-not the mediator of desired objects but the object of all desire

Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its qualityas a means to its convertibility into more definite values sothoroughly and unreservedly developed into a completelyengrossing final purpose governing our practical conscious-ness (232)

In this situation all objects index money rather than vice-versa andthe notion of money displaces God as the transcendental signified-a sin Hoccleve would have recognized as cupiditas26

26 Cf Marxs understanding of money as the lord and god of the world of commodi-ties (Grundrisse 221) For the echo of Derrida in my phrasing here see R A ShoafDante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word Money Images and Reference in Late Medieval

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 187

Whether or not we agree with Marx that the notion of greed is in-separable from the economic function of the money form it is cer-tainly the case that in the Middle Ages cupiditas was increasinglyseen as the most serious of the sins27 The Church of course hadmuch to say about this sin my specific concern here is with greedsrelationship to the clerical understanding of money the prominentfeature of which was the notion of just price For Aquinas whosereading of Aristotle was the point of departure for just price theoriststhroughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

[I]f either the price exceed the quantity of the things worthor conversely the thing exceed the price there is no longer theequality of justice and consequently to sell a thing for morethan its worth or to buy it for less than its worth is in itself un-just and unlawful 28

Such a rule of commerce depends obviously on the worth of athing being based on something other than price and for Aquinasthis extra-monetary referent is human need for which money is anumerical index But this one standard which truly measures allthings is demand This includes all commutable things inasmuch as

Poetry (Norman Okla Pilgrim Books 1983) Money is preeminently the meanswhich becomes an end Money is accumulated want without a referent able to refer toanything or nothing and therefore likely in the absence of anything else to refer to itself(241)

27 For Marxs argument see eg Grundrisse Money is therefore not only the objectbut also the fountainhead of greed (222) For one of the many discussions of greed inthe Middle Ages see Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages trans Rodney J Pay-ton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1996)25-27

28 Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica22 q 77 art 1 trans Fathers of the English Do-minican Province (New York Bezinger 1947) For a lucid discussion of just price theoriesthrough the thirteenth century see John W Baldwin The Medieval Theories of the JustPrice Romanists Canonists and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesTransactions of the American Philosophical Society49 (1959) 3-92 Of the three groups of the-orists Baldwin discusses the former two are fairly characterized as theorists of economicpractice while the latter may be described as theorists of economic ideology Since myconcern here is more with ideology than practice I take the theologians views as the me-dieval norm Also helpful in elucidating these views is Lester K Little Religious Poverty andthe Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1978) and espe-ciallYJoel Kaye Economy and Nature in theFourteenth Century (Cambridge Cambridge Uni-versity Press 1998) For a reading of Chaucers Shipmans Tale in light of the problematicbut nevertheless normative economic ideas Baldwin describes see Lee Patterson Chaucerand the Subject of Histary (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1991)349-65

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

188 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

everything has a reference to human need29 Although Aquinasrecognizes that the specific capacity to satisfy human need is not anabsolutely fixed quality of things-and this presents a theoreticalproblem inherited from Aristotle which he never fully resolves-itnevertheless ought to be determinable and relatively stable andthus prices in ajust world ought to reflect this determinacy and sta-bility Fluctuations in price although expected to some degree in-dicate a departure from the just norm a deviation from the idealmost likely motivated by cupiditas which in this regard is defined asthe desire simply to possess money rather than to use it to satisfy needHence Aquinas distinguishes between using money to satisfy theneeds of life and using it for profit which satisfies the greed forgain which knows no limit and tends to infinity 30Nicole Oresmethe fourteenth-century translator of Aristotle and author of De mon-eta (which was translated into English in the fifteenth century)makes much the same distinction in his description of money as ar-tificial riches in comparison to the natural riches of the com-modities it purchases any desire for purely monetary wealth istherefore vile and unnatural and stems from an individualsgreedy and disgraceful enhancement of his own profit31

I do not mean to imply here that the scholastic attempts to for-mulate a notion of just price represent an ignorance or oversimpli-cation of the nature of a money economy Rather Aquinass notionof just price represents as Joel Kaye has persuasively shown a so-phisticated attempt to reconcile the relativistic implications of amonetized economy with the traditional understanding of an onto-logically ordered universe of graded values where every object andsubject has its fixed place in the order of being from God down tothe least of his creations 32Yet on this topic Aquinass great pow-ers of synthesis do not entirely succeed Instead of forging an un-ambiguous link between divine justice and the dynamics of the

29 Aquinas Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 59981trans C 1 Litzinger (ChicagoHenry Regnery Company 1964)

30 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 431 The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents trans Charles Johnson

(London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1956)2542Oresme is specifically arguing hereagainst the profit-making activity of royal debasements of the coinage which he sees asworse than usury

32 Kaye Economy and Nature 50

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 179

to be the national center of conspicuous consumption On his wayto work every morning Hoccleve could not have missed what Ger-vase Rosser describes as [t] he fashionable excesses of courtcouture-excesses that could only have been magnified by contrastsince as in todays New York City [l]ife in Westminster entailedconstant exposure to the extremes of wealth and poverty12Moneyor the lack of it was never far from the mind of a City dweller andfor many it no doubt loomed large in their perception of what waswrong with the world As one contemporary of Hoccleve complainsvisiting in turn everyone from the man of lawat Westminster to thebarge-man at Belyngsgate for lack ofmony I cold not spede13

The political situation of the early fifteenth century greatly exac-erbated-if not indeed produced-this perception At what was thegreatest political crisis of Hoccleves lifetime the deposition ofRichard II one of the principal charges against Richard was that hewas a poor money manager-in the words of one historian that hehad heedlessly squandered the revenues of the Crown on favouritesand had then been compelled to levyunwarranted taxes on his sub-jects 14That such an accusation could legitimate a deposition sug-gests not only that money was a prominent object of politicalconcern but also that its proper management was understood asfundamental to a healthy kingdom Such an understanding wouldin fact haunt Richards successor throughout his reign Henry IVsfinances as is well-known were a disaster He had less income thanRichard but greater expenses as he had obligations not only to his

12 Gervase Rosser Medieval Westminster 1200-1540 (Oxford Clarendon Press 1989)145225Britnell notes that Westminsters booming market for luxury goods was drivenby an exceptional concentration of expenditure by families in the upper income brack-ets (The Commercialisation of English Society 1000-1500 194)

13 This is one permutation of the refrain of London Lickpenny in Rossel Hope Robbinsed Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York Columbia University Press1959) 130-34 Although this poem is not about the general as much as one individualsshortage of coin the reliance of the London economy on the easy flow of money and thecorruption that is perceived as deriving therefrom is readily apparent in the poets vividcomplaint See also in the same volume the immediately following poem Money Money

14 G L Harriss Financial Policy in Henry V The Practice of Kingship ed G L Harris(Oxford Oxford University Press 1985) 159-79 at 160 In addition to this article in thisparagraph I rely on Christopher Allmand Henry V (London Methuen 1992) 384-403Chris Given-Wilson The Royal Household and the Kings Affinity (New Haven Yale UniversityPress 1986)76-141 and E FJacob The Fifteenth Century 1399-1485 (Oxford ClarendonPress 1961) 73-90

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

180 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

own supporters but to virtually all of Richards (whom he for obvi-ous reasons did not wish to alienate) as well as the costs of theWelsh rebellion and the keeping of a household that quickly becamejust as if not more lavish than his predecessors Not surprisinglythen from the beginning of Henry IVs reign the Commons washighly critical of his money management and-most relevant to mypurposes here-especially critical of his handling of annuities Thiscriticism cut two ways on the one hand Henry was seen as too gen-erous in granting annuities burdening the Crown revenue with alarge indefinite annual commitment on the other he was taken totask for being constantly behind in payments especially since manyof the recipients were in Parliament The problem was deemed im-portant enough that in his first Parliament Henry V was authorizedto reduce annuities by pound10000 and by 1421 he had cut them bypound12000 to about half the amount supported by his father Suchmeasures although by and large seen by historians as necessary andeffective could not but have been experienced by the recipients ofannuities-as we see in the case of Hoccleve-as a sign of the con-tinuing instability of the realm rather than its reinvigoration

Hoccleves specific place in this general socioeconomic and polit-ical context was as ambiguous as it was insecure As a petty civil ser-vant in the early fifteenth century he had no pre-established place inthe ideology of estates he was neither gentle nor (actively) clericalnor a laborer nor even a member of the ambiguous but well-estab-lished class of merchants Moreover although Michael Bennet claimsthat in general [p] oor clerks and minor court officials shared theworld of petty artisans and retailers Hoccleves standard of living atleast while he lived at Chesters Inn with his fellow Privy Seal clerkswas most likely more lavish than would be expected for one of his so-cioeconomic status15John Burrow in his extremely informative bio-bibliography of the poet refers to this Inn as a hostel 16 but it wasas the London house of the Bishop of Chester and the residence ofthe Keeper of the Privy Seal-who was after the Chancellor and theTreasurer the third most important minister of state-most likely

15 Michael Bennett Careerism in Late Medieval England in People Politics and Com-munity in the Later Middle Ages edJoel Rosenthal and Colin Richmond (Gloucester AlanSutton 1987) 19-39 at 32

16J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve (Aldershot Variorum 1994)7

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 181

more luxurious than that term now connotes From his study of thewill of john Prophete who was Keeper from 1406-15 A L Brownconcludes that the household that the Keeper maintained with hisclerks was quite elaborate Clearly Prophete and surely the otherkeepers also maintained a large household and it is not surprisingthat Hoccleve worried about the poor cot he would live in when heretired 17 Indeed several times in the Regement of Princes Hocclevemakes clear that his fear over the loss of his income is so powerfulprecisely because he is so used to a relatively luxurious life-see eglines 847967-73 and most explicitly 1220-23

I have had habundanceOf welfare ay and now stond in the plytOf scarsetee it were a greet penanceFor me-God sheelde me fro that streit chance

Living in a lavish household and in his work frequently coming intocontact with aristocrats and even members of the royal family Hoc-cleve had a taste of a gentlemans standard of living that belied hismore income-appropriate socioeconomic association with petty ar-tisans and retailers He knew both what it was like to live like an aris-tocrat and at the same time that such a life was in fact well beyondhis means

Lurking at the center of this ambiguity was for Hoccleve the in-escapable relation between money and his social location He wasentirely dependant on the Privy Seal for his livelihood and we knowfrom his own repeated references to the fact that the most crucialcomponent of this livelihood was his annuitee 18 A semiannual

17 A L Brown The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fifteenth Century in The Study ofMedieval Records Essays in Honor of Kathleen Major ed D A Ballough and R L Storey (Ox-ford Clarendon Press 1971)260-81 at 266 Browns conclusion that the clerks dwelt inthe Keepers household was an issue that T F Tout Chapters in the Administrative History ofMediaeval England The Wardrobe the Chamber and the Small Seals (Manchester University ofManchester Press 1930) left inconclusive In regard to the Privy Seal clerks generally in-flated socioeconomic status see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity the very same momentthat had witnessed a crisis of financial insecurity on the part of these clerks also seems tohave witnessed an elevation in their social position (364) For the economic role playedby the aristocratic inn during Hoccleves lifetime see Caroline M Barron Centres ofConspicuous Consumption The Aristocratic Town House in London 1200-1550 LondonJournal 20 (1995) 1-16

18 Eg Ill theschequeer he of his special grace Hath to me grauntid an annuitee Of tw(nti mark whyle I have lyves space (RP820-22)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

182 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

royal grant of a fixed amount this source of income had neither awages direct relation to labor and potential for negotiation nor abenefices long-term stability and independence from labor Thus initself socially ambiguous this source of income was nevertheless ashe himself vividly describes in La male regle the essential element ofHoccleves social identity

Wher was a gretter maister eek than ~Or bet aqweyntid at Westmynstre YateAmong the tauerneres namelyAnd cookes whan I cam eerly or lateI pynchid nat at hem in myn acateBut paied hem as pat they axe woldeWherfore I was the welcomere algateAnd for a verray gentil man yholde

Othir than maistir callid was I neuereAmong this meynee in myn audienceMe thoughte I was ymaad a man foreuereSo tikelid me pat nyce reuerencepat it me made largere of despenseThan pat I thoghte han been MR 177-206

His title of maister and his status as gentil depended not uponanything inherent in his position but upon the fact that he paiedthe tavern-keepers cooks and boatmen as pat they axe wolde Hisannuity made his social status bluntly quantifiable in economicterms he was precisely twenty marks worth of a maister 19 Cor-relatively this meant that being yrnaad a man was inseparable fromthe knowledge that such a monetarily propped status was self-consuming-that his title of maister required him to spend thevery money that produced it And what was even more central toHoccleves great anxiety the disbursement of the money that madepossible this status was utterly unpredictable it was always late often

19 In other words Hoccleves social status was perceived as directly proportional to themoney in his pocket This fact resonates with Hoccleves complaint in the Regement ofPrinces that his wit (or more precisely the wit he is recognized as possessing) is directlyproportional to his silver For althogh that myn heed undir myn hood Was neverewysyit whyl it with me stood So that I hadde silver resonable My lytil wit was sumwhatcovenable (1236-39)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 183

under threat of being suspended and on at least two occasions ap-parently not paid20

Given then both the real unpredictability and indeterminate so-cial status of his annuity an ambiguous social location whose tenu-ous elevation was based to a large degree on the fact that he hadsuch an income and the very public relationship between annuitiesin general and the troubles of his Lancastrian employers it is not atall surprising that Hoccleve s pervasive sense of his own and theworlds instability often seized on the idea of money as its imagina-tive vehicle As he laments in the Regement of Princes immediatelyafter revealing the source of his twenti mark income

Mighte I ay payd been of that dueteeIt sholde stonde weI ynow with meBut paiement is hard to gete adayesAnd that me putte in many foule affrayes RP 823-26

Hoccleves poetry of foule affrayes-ie his miserable distur-bances or fears hence his profound anxiety-derives from his ob-sessive concern with money in an historical context troubled ingeneral with money problems For Hoccleve money was not simplya financial instrument but the natural poetic vehicle for exploring aview of the world whose cracks and seams were beginning to show

Amidst the political social religious and economic unrest of theearly fifteenth century Hoccleve as poems such as the Remonstranceagainst Oldcastle suggest wanted to hold onto a traditional world vieweven though to do so meant seeing much of his world as corrupt Inthis regard Derek Pearsalls description of Langland holds as wellfor Hoccleve his response to the social realities he perceives is al-ways that of a devout Christian who sees all change and transforma-tion as a form of decay and who struggles to comprehend thenature of change within the structure of a traditional mode of

20 See J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 8-9 12-13 for a discussion of Hoccleves annuityas well as the appendix of this book (33-49) listing mentions of Hoccleve in the historicalrecord including each of his annuity payments For a similar reading of the maister pas-sage in La male regle see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity 364 Some critics finding thenumber and extent of Hoccleves financial complaints to belie the typicality and to out-weigh the real gravity of his situation show little sympathy for his obsession See for ex-ample Malcolm Richardson Hoccleve in His Social Context ChauR20 (1986) 313-22

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

184 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

thought 21 Hoccleve was in his struggle to understand his changingworld and his place within it experiencing what sociologists today calla crisis of meaning his own traditionalism did not seem to haveplace for someone in his position22 In this situation an individualmay either reject the reigning world view and search for alternativesor try to discover and even ameliorate what has gone wrong (I use in-dividual agency figuratively here crises of meaning and responses tothem are of course both psychological and social phenomena) Thetradespeople of London for readily apparent reasons frequentlychose the first strategy and in the early fifteenth century their het-erodoxy often took the form of Lollardy23 Such antitraditionalism al-though assuming a quite different form may also be observed amongHoccleves fellow clerks While far from being LOllards these clerksleveraged their novel professional situation to their own financial ben-efit demonstrating a nascent entrepreneurship quite out of keeping

21 Derek Pearsall Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman in Medieval English Stud-ies Presented to GeorgeKane ed Edward Donald Kennedy Ronald Waldron and Joseph SWittig (Wolfeboro NH DS Brewer 1988) 167-85 at 174-75 Strohms characterizationof Hoccleves orthodoxy is unequivocal his text everywhere announces its preferencefor the orthodox and the legitimate in their struggle against adulteration (EnglandsEmpty Throne 146) For a recent analysis of the Regement and the Remonstrance Against Old-castle that suggests how disturbingly clever Hoccleve could be at expressing this politicaland religious orthodoxy see Ruth Nisse Oure Fadres Olde and Modres GenderHeresy and Hocc1eves Literary Politics SAC21 (1999) 275-99

22 For a helpful discussion of this kind of personal and social crisis see Peter L Bergerand Thomas Luckmann Modernity Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning The Orientation ofModern Man (Giitersloh Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers 1995) The condition fora crisis of meaning is that the members of a particular life-community accept unques-tioningly the degree of coincidence of meaning expected of them but are unable tomatch it [T]his discrepancy between is and should appears particularly often if theideals of a life community insist that it should be a complete community of meaning(23) From the evidence of his poetry we can gather that Hoccleve at least wished to ac-cept unquestioningly the traditional world view and just as certainly he-because thatworld view could not really account for him-was unable to match it in all his percep-tions and actions

23 Lollardy had spread rapidly in the City especially among the literate middle classwho now that their own economic failure was threatened resented more than ever thewealth of the Church (Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community 74) InterestinglyNightingale notes on the next page that Robert Chichele one of the aldermen of the Gro-cers Company when its ordinances were translated into English in 1418 commissionedHoccleve to translate a ballad into English This is the poem Furnivall calls An EnglishtBalade to the Virgin and Christ in Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Frederick J Furni-vall et al EETS es 61 and 73 (London Oxford University Press 1970) 67-72

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 185

with the official clerical attitude toward moneymaking In a profes-sion increasingly pervaded by money Privy Seal clerks such asRobert Frye became wealthy in part because they had no compunc-tions about influence-peddling or moneylending24 Perhaps becausehis attempts to make money in this manner failed more often thanthey succeeded-as he himself describes in the Regement of Princes(1499-547) where he complains that clerks are often cheated- out ofthe fee by which they are enticed to pen something favorable to aLord-Hoccleve chose to remain a traditionalist Hoccleve a clericin minor orders who kept up a hope for a benefice for at least tenand possibly twenty years or more responded to a personal and so-cial crisis of meaning by searching for what went wrong

The Idea of Money

Georg Simmel the great turn-of-the-century sociologist offers thefollowing formulation of the idea of money

Money is the representative of abstract value From the eco-nomic relationship ie the exchangeability of objects the factof this relationship is extracted and acquires in contrast tothose objects a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbolMoney is a specific realization of what is common to economicobjects25

From this he derives two important-and bipolar-corollaries Firstas the representation of value that is common to economic objectsmoney foregrounds the differential relativity of value ie the factthat rather than having intrinsic worth each object obtains valueonly in relation to all other objects a relation mediated by the com-mon measurement of price In Simmels words money

24 See Browns discussion of Frye (The Privy Seal Clerks 272-75) and Richardsonscomparison of Frye and Hoccleve (Hoccleve in His Social Context 314-21) as well asTout Chapters in the Administrative History on which both of the former two studies draw

25 Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Money trans Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (Lon-don Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1978) 120 Among alternative theoretical frameworks themost notable is Marxs whose formulation of money as the universal equivalent form issimilar to Simmels His notion of what constitutes economic value is however quite dif-fenmiddotnt See in Capital A Critique of Political Economy trans Ben Fowkes (HarmondsworthPenguin Books 1976) the first 75 pages or so and in Grundrisse Foundations of the Cri-tique of Political Economy trans Martin Nicolaus (New York Vintage Books 1973) thechapttT on money

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

186 Hoccleue and the Apprehension of Money

represents within the practical world the most certain imageand the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being ac-cording to which things receive their meaning through eachother and have their being determined by their mutual rela-tions (128)

Such relativity necessarily entails some degree of awareness of the in-stability or unfixedness of value as the worth of objects as measuredby price changes as the relationships among objects-and betweenobjects and money-change since the value of things has becomedetached from the objects and has acquired an independent exis-tence in a specific substance money can develop interests move-ments and norms that on occasion act contrary to those of thesymbolized objects (165) Second and conversely because moneyis the universal representation of economic value it appears to standabove values differential relativity

By sublimating the relativity of things money seems to avoidrelativity [M]oney as abstract value expresses nothing butthe relativity of things that constitute value and money asthe stable pole contrasts with eternal movements fluctuationsand equations of objects (121)

When apprehended in this manner money obtains the character ofa psychological absolute as llthe absolutely commensurate expres-sion and equivalent of all values money possesses a significant re-lationship to the notion of God (236) The danger here is thatmoney as an absolute means very easily becomes an absolute end-not the mediator of desired objects but the object of all desire

Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its qualityas a means to its convertibility into more definite values sothoroughly and unreservedly developed into a completelyengrossing final purpose governing our practical conscious-ness (232)

In this situation all objects index money rather than vice-versa andthe notion of money displaces God as the transcendental signified-a sin Hoccleve would have recognized as cupiditas26

26 Cf Marxs understanding of money as the lord and god of the world of commodi-ties (Grundrisse 221) For the echo of Derrida in my phrasing here see R A ShoafDante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word Money Images and Reference in Late Medieval

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 187

Whether or not we agree with Marx that the notion of greed is in-separable from the economic function of the money form it is cer-tainly the case that in the Middle Ages cupiditas was increasinglyseen as the most serious of the sins27 The Church of course hadmuch to say about this sin my specific concern here is with greedsrelationship to the clerical understanding of money the prominentfeature of which was the notion of just price For Aquinas whosereading of Aristotle was the point of departure for just price theoriststhroughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

[I]f either the price exceed the quantity of the things worthor conversely the thing exceed the price there is no longer theequality of justice and consequently to sell a thing for morethan its worth or to buy it for less than its worth is in itself un-just and unlawful 28

Such a rule of commerce depends obviously on the worth of athing being based on something other than price and for Aquinasthis extra-monetary referent is human need for which money is anumerical index But this one standard which truly measures allthings is demand This includes all commutable things inasmuch as

Poetry (Norman Okla Pilgrim Books 1983) Money is preeminently the meanswhich becomes an end Money is accumulated want without a referent able to refer toanything or nothing and therefore likely in the absence of anything else to refer to itself(241)

27 For Marxs argument see eg Grundrisse Money is therefore not only the objectbut also the fountainhead of greed (222) For one of the many discussions of greed inthe Middle Ages see Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages trans Rodney J Pay-ton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1996)25-27

28 Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica22 q 77 art 1 trans Fathers of the English Do-minican Province (New York Bezinger 1947) For a lucid discussion of just price theoriesthrough the thirteenth century see John W Baldwin The Medieval Theories of the JustPrice Romanists Canonists and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesTransactions of the American Philosophical Society49 (1959) 3-92 Of the three groups of the-orists Baldwin discusses the former two are fairly characterized as theorists of economicpractice while the latter may be described as theorists of economic ideology Since myconcern here is more with ideology than practice I take the theologians views as the me-dieval norm Also helpful in elucidating these views is Lester K Little Religious Poverty andthe Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1978) and espe-ciallYJoel Kaye Economy and Nature in theFourteenth Century (Cambridge Cambridge Uni-versity Press 1998) For a reading of Chaucers Shipmans Tale in light of the problematicbut nevertheless normative economic ideas Baldwin describes see Lee Patterson Chaucerand the Subject of Histary (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1991)349-65

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

188 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

everything has a reference to human need29 Although Aquinasrecognizes that the specific capacity to satisfy human need is not anabsolutely fixed quality of things-and this presents a theoreticalproblem inherited from Aristotle which he never fully resolves-itnevertheless ought to be determinable and relatively stable andthus prices in ajust world ought to reflect this determinacy and sta-bility Fluctuations in price although expected to some degree in-dicate a departure from the just norm a deviation from the idealmost likely motivated by cupiditas which in this regard is defined asthe desire simply to possess money rather than to use it to satisfy needHence Aquinas distinguishes between using money to satisfy theneeds of life and using it for profit which satisfies the greed forgain which knows no limit and tends to infinity 30Nicole Oresmethe fourteenth-century translator of Aristotle and author of De mon-eta (which was translated into English in the fifteenth century)makes much the same distinction in his description of money as ar-tificial riches in comparison to the natural riches of the com-modities it purchases any desire for purely monetary wealth istherefore vile and unnatural and stems from an individualsgreedy and disgraceful enhancement of his own profit31

I do not mean to imply here that the scholastic attempts to for-mulate a notion of just price represent an ignorance or oversimpli-cation of the nature of a money economy Rather Aquinass notionof just price represents as Joel Kaye has persuasively shown a so-phisticated attempt to reconcile the relativistic implications of amonetized economy with the traditional understanding of an onto-logically ordered universe of graded values where every object andsubject has its fixed place in the order of being from God down tothe least of his creations 32Yet on this topic Aquinass great pow-ers of synthesis do not entirely succeed Instead of forging an un-ambiguous link between divine justice and the dynamics of the

29 Aquinas Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 59981trans C 1 Litzinger (ChicagoHenry Regnery Company 1964)

30 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 431 The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents trans Charles Johnson

(London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1956)2542Oresme is specifically arguing hereagainst the profit-making activity of royal debasements of the coinage which he sees asworse than usury

32 Kaye Economy and Nature 50

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

180 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

own supporters but to virtually all of Richards (whom he for obvi-ous reasons did not wish to alienate) as well as the costs of theWelsh rebellion and the keeping of a household that quickly becamejust as if not more lavish than his predecessors Not surprisinglythen from the beginning of Henry IVs reign the Commons washighly critical of his money management and-most relevant to mypurposes here-especially critical of his handling of annuities Thiscriticism cut two ways on the one hand Henry was seen as too gen-erous in granting annuities burdening the Crown revenue with alarge indefinite annual commitment on the other he was taken totask for being constantly behind in payments especially since manyof the recipients were in Parliament The problem was deemed im-portant enough that in his first Parliament Henry V was authorizedto reduce annuities by pound10000 and by 1421 he had cut them bypound12000 to about half the amount supported by his father Suchmeasures although by and large seen by historians as necessary andeffective could not but have been experienced by the recipients ofannuities-as we see in the case of Hoccleve-as a sign of the con-tinuing instability of the realm rather than its reinvigoration

Hoccleves specific place in this general socioeconomic and polit-ical context was as ambiguous as it was insecure As a petty civil ser-vant in the early fifteenth century he had no pre-established place inthe ideology of estates he was neither gentle nor (actively) clericalnor a laborer nor even a member of the ambiguous but well-estab-lished class of merchants Moreover although Michael Bennet claimsthat in general [p] oor clerks and minor court officials shared theworld of petty artisans and retailers Hoccleves standard of living atleast while he lived at Chesters Inn with his fellow Privy Seal clerkswas most likely more lavish than would be expected for one of his so-cioeconomic status15John Burrow in his extremely informative bio-bibliography of the poet refers to this Inn as a hostel 16 but it wasas the London house of the Bishop of Chester and the residence ofthe Keeper of the Privy Seal-who was after the Chancellor and theTreasurer the third most important minister of state-most likely

15 Michael Bennett Careerism in Late Medieval England in People Politics and Com-munity in the Later Middle Ages edJoel Rosenthal and Colin Richmond (Gloucester AlanSutton 1987) 19-39 at 32

16J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve (Aldershot Variorum 1994)7

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 181

more luxurious than that term now connotes From his study of thewill of john Prophete who was Keeper from 1406-15 A L Brownconcludes that the household that the Keeper maintained with hisclerks was quite elaborate Clearly Prophete and surely the otherkeepers also maintained a large household and it is not surprisingthat Hoccleve worried about the poor cot he would live in when heretired 17 Indeed several times in the Regement of Princes Hocclevemakes clear that his fear over the loss of his income is so powerfulprecisely because he is so used to a relatively luxurious life-see eglines 847967-73 and most explicitly 1220-23

I have had habundanceOf welfare ay and now stond in the plytOf scarsetee it were a greet penanceFor me-God sheelde me fro that streit chance

Living in a lavish household and in his work frequently coming intocontact with aristocrats and even members of the royal family Hoc-cleve had a taste of a gentlemans standard of living that belied hismore income-appropriate socioeconomic association with petty ar-tisans and retailers He knew both what it was like to live like an aris-tocrat and at the same time that such a life was in fact well beyondhis means

Lurking at the center of this ambiguity was for Hoccleve the in-escapable relation between money and his social location He wasentirely dependant on the Privy Seal for his livelihood and we knowfrom his own repeated references to the fact that the most crucialcomponent of this livelihood was his annuitee 18 A semiannual

17 A L Brown The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fifteenth Century in The Study ofMedieval Records Essays in Honor of Kathleen Major ed D A Ballough and R L Storey (Ox-ford Clarendon Press 1971)260-81 at 266 Browns conclusion that the clerks dwelt inthe Keepers household was an issue that T F Tout Chapters in the Administrative History ofMediaeval England The Wardrobe the Chamber and the Small Seals (Manchester University ofManchester Press 1930) left inconclusive In regard to the Privy Seal clerks generally in-flated socioeconomic status see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity the very same momentthat had witnessed a crisis of financial insecurity on the part of these clerks also seems tohave witnessed an elevation in their social position (364) For the economic role playedby the aristocratic inn during Hoccleves lifetime see Caroline M Barron Centres ofConspicuous Consumption The Aristocratic Town House in London 1200-1550 LondonJournal 20 (1995) 1-16

18 Eg Ill theschequeer he of his special grace Hath to me grauntid an annuitee Of tw(nti mark whyle I have lyves space (RP820-22)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

182 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

royal grant of a fixed amount this source of income had neither awages direct relation to labor and potential for negotiation nor abenefices long-term stability and independence from labor Thus initself socially ambiguous this source of income was nevertheless ashe himself vividly describes in La male regle the essential element ofHoccleves social identity

Wher was a gretter maister eek than ~Or bet aqweyntid at Westmynstre YateAmong the tauerneres namelyAnd cookes whan I cam eerly or lateI pynchid nat at hem in myn acateBut paied hem as pat they axe woldeWherfore I was the welcomere algateAnd for a verray gentil man yholde

Othir than maistir callid was I neuereAmong this meynee in myn audienceMe thoughte I was ymaad a man foreuereSo tikelid me pat nyce reuerencepat it me made largere of despenseThan pat I thoghte han been MR 177-206

His title of maister and his status as gentil depended not uponanything inherent in his position but upon the fact that he paiedthe tavern-keepers cooks and boatmen as pat they axe wolde Hisannuity made his social status bluntly quantifiable in economicterms he was precisely twenty marks worth of a maister 19 Cor-relatively this meant that being yrnaad a man was inseparable fromthe knowledge that such a monetarily propped status was self-consuming-that his title of maister required him to spend thevery money that produced it And what was even more central toHoccleves great anxiety the disbursement of the money that madepossible this status was utterly unpredictable it was always late often

19 In other words Hoccleves social status was perceived as directly proportional to themoney in his pocket This fact resonates with Hoccleves complaint in the Regement ofPrinces that his wit (or more precisely the wit he is recognized as possessing) is directlyproportional to his silver For althogh that myn heed undir myn hood Was neverewysyit whyl it with me stood So that I hadde silver resonable My lytil wit was sumwhatcovenable (1236-39)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 183

under threat of being suspended and on at least two occasions ap-parently not paid20

Given then both the real unpredictability and indeterminate so-cial status of his annuity an ambiguous social location whose tenu-ous elevation was based to a large degree on the fact that he hadsuch an income and the very public relationship between annuitiesin general and the troubles of his Lancastrian employers it is not atall surprising that Hoccleve s pervasive sense of his own and theworlds instability often seized on the idea of money as its imagina-tive vehicle As he laments in the Regement of Princes immediatelyafter revealing the source of his twenti mark income

Mighte I ay payd been of that dueteeIt sholde stonde weI ynow with meBut paiement is hard to gete adayesAnd that me putte in many foule affrayes RP 823-26

Hoccleves poetry of foule affrayes-ie his miserable distur-bances or fears hence his profound anxiety-derives from his ob-sessive concern with money in an historical context troubled ingeneral with money problems For Hoccleve money was not simplya financial instrument but the natural poetic vehicle for exploring aview of the world whose cracks and seams were beginning to show

Amidst the political social religious and economic unrest of theearly fifteenth century Hoccleve as poems such as the Remonstranceagainst Oldcastle suggest wanted to hold onto a traditional world vieweven though to do so meant seeing much of his world as corrupt Inthis regard Derek Pearsalls description of Langland holds as wellfor Hoccleve his response to the social realities he perceives is al-ways that of a devout Christian who sees all change and transforma-tion as a form of decay and who struggles to comprehend thenature of change within the structure of a traditional mode of

20 See J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 8-9 12-13 for a discussion of Hoccleves annuityas well as the appendix of this book (33-49) listing mentions of Hoccleve in the historicalrecord including each of his annuity payments For a similar reading of the maister pas-sage in La male regle see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity 364 Some critics finding thenumber and extent of Hoccleves financial complaints to belie the typicality and to out-weigh the real gravity of his situation show little sympathy for his obsession See for ex-ample Malcolm Richardson Hoccleve in His Social Context ChauR20 (1986) 313-22

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

184 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

thought 21 Hoccleve was in his struggle to understand his changingworld and his place within it experiencing what sociologists today calla crisis of meaning his own traditionalism did not seem to haveplace for someone in his position22 In this situation an individualmay either reject the reigning world view and search for alternativesor try to discover and even ameliorate what has gone wrong (I use in-dividual agency figuratively here crises of meaning and responses tothem are of course both psychological and social phenomena) Thetradespeople of London for readily apparent reasons frequentlychose the first strategy and in the early fifteenth century their het-erodoxy often took the form of Lollardy23 Such antitraditionalism al-though assuming a quite different form may also be observed amongHoccleves fellow clerks While far from being LOllards these clerksleveraged their novel professional situation to their own financial ben-efit demonstrating a nascent entrepreneurship quite out of keeping

21 Derek Pearsall Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman in Medieval English Stud-ies Presented to GeorgeKane ed Edward Donald Kennedy Ronald Waldron and Joseph SWittig (Wolfeboro NH DS Brewer 1988) 167-85 at 174-75 Strohms characterizationof Hoccleves orthodoxy is unequivocal his text everywhere announces its preferencefor the orthodox and the legitimate in their struggle against adulteration (EnglandsEmpty Throne 146) For a recent analysis of the Regement and the Remonstrance Against Old-castle that suggests how disturbingly clever Hoccleve could be at expressing this politicaland religious orthodoxy see Ruth Nisse Oure Fadres Olde and Modres GenderHeresy and Hocc1eves Literary Politics SAC21 (1999) 275-99

22 For a helpful discussion of this kind of personal and social crisis see Peter L Bergerand Thomas Luckmann Modernity Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning The Orientation ofModern Man (Giitersloh Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers 1995) The condition fora crisis of meaning is that the members of a particular life-community accept unques-tioningly the degree of coincidence of meaning expected of them but are unable tomatch it [T]his discrepancy between is and should appears particularly often if theideals of a life community insist that it should be a complete community of meaning(23) From the evidence of his poetry we can gather that Hoccleve at least wished to ac-cept unquestioningly the traditional world view and just as certainly he-because thatworld view could not really account for him-was unable to match it in all his percep-tions and actions

23 Lollardy had spread rapidly in the City especially among the literate middle classwho now that their own economic failure was threatened resented more than ever thewealth of the Church (Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community 74) InterestinglyNightingale notes on the next page that Robert Chichele one of the aldermen of the Gro-cers Company when its ordinances were translated into English in 1418 commissionedHoccleve to translate a ballad into English This is the poem Furnivall calls An EnglishtBalade to the Virgin and Christ in Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Frederick J Furni-vall et al EETS es 61 and 73 (London Oxford University Press 1970) 67-72

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 185

with the official clerical attitude toward moneymaking In a profes-sion increasingly pervaded by money Privy Seal clerks such asRobert Frye became wealthy in part because they had no compunc-tions about influence-peddling or moneylending24 Perhaps becausehis attempts to make money in this manner failed more often thanthey succeeded-as he himself describes in the Regement of Princes(1499-547) where he complains that clerks are often cheated- out ofthe fee by which they are enticed to pen something favorable to aLord-Hoccleve chose to remain a traditionalist Hoccleve a clericin minor orders who kept up a hope for a benefice for at least tenand possibly twenty years or more responded to a personal and so-cial crisis of meaning by searching for what went wrong

The Idea of Money

Georg Simmel the great turn-of-the-century sociologist offers thefollowing formulation of the idea of money

Money is the representative of abstract value From the eco-nomic relationship ie the exchangeability of objects the factof this relationship is extracted and acquires in contrast tothose objects a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbolMoney is a specific realization of what is common to economicobjects25

From this he derives two important-and bipolar-corollaries Firstas the representation of value that is common to economic objectsmoney foregrounds the differential relativity of value ie the factthat rather than having intrinsic worth each object obtains valueonly in relation to all other objects a relation mediated by the com-mon measurement of price In Simmels words money

24 See Browns discussion of Frye (The Privy Seal Clerks 272-75) and Richardsonscomparison of Frye and Hoccleve (Hoccleve in His Social Context 314-21) as well asTout Chapters in the Administrative History on which both of the former two studies draw

25 Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Money trans Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (Lon-don Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1978) 120 Among alternative theoretical frameworks themost notable is Marxs whose formulation of money as the universal equivalent form issimilar to Simmels His notion of what constitutes economic value is however quite dif-fenmiddotnt See in Capital A Critique of Political Economy trans Ben Fowkes (HarmondsworthPenguin Books 1976) the first 75 pages or so and in Grundrisse Foundations of the Cri-tique of Political Economy trans Martin Nicolaus (New York Vintage Books 1973) thechapttT on money

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

186 Hoccleue and the Apprehension of Money

represents within the practical world the most certain imageand the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being ac-cording to which things receive their meaning through eachother and have their being determined by their mutual rela-tions (128)

Such relativity necessarily entails some degree of awareness of the in-stability or unfixedness of value as the worth of objects as measuredby price changes as the relationships among objects-and betweenobjects and money-change since the value of things has becomedetached from the objects and has acquired an independent exis-tence in a specific substance money can develop interests move-ments and norms that on occasion act contrary to those of thesymbolized objects (165) Second and conversely because moneyis the universal representation of economic value it appears to standabove values differential relativity

By sublimating the relativity of things money seems to avoidrelativity [M]oney as abstract value expresses nothing butthe relativity of things that constitute value and money asthe stable pole contrasts with eternal movements fluctuationsand equations of objects (121)

When apprehended in this manner money obtains the character ofa psychological absolute as llthe absolutely commensurate expres-sion and equivalent of all values money possesses a significant re-lationship to the notion of God (236) The danger here is thatmoney as an absolute means very easily becomes an absolute end-not the mediator of desired objects but the object of all desire

Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its qualityas a means to its convertibility into more definite values sothoroughly and unreservedly developed into a completelyengrossing final purpose governing our practical conscious-ness (232)

In this situation all objects index money rather than vice-versa andthe notion of money displaces God as the transcendental signified-a sin Hoccleve would have recognized as cupiditas26

26 Cf Marxs understanding of money as the lord and god of the world of commodi-ties (Grundrisse 221) For the echo of Derrida in my phrasing here see R A ShoafDante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word Money Images and Reference in Late Medieval

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 187

Whether or not we agree with Marx that the notion of greed is in-separable from the economic function of the money form it is cer-tainly the case that in the Middle Ages cupiditas was increasinglyseen as the most serious of the sins27 The Church of course hadmuch to say about this sin my specific concern here is with greedsrelationship to the clerical understanding of money the prominentfeature of which was the notion of just price For Aquinas whosereading of Aristotle was the point of departure for just price theoriststhroughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

[I]f either the price exceed the quantity of the things worthor conversely the thing exceed the price there is no longer theequality of justice and consequently to sell a thing for morethan its worth or to buy it for less than its worth is in itself un-just and unlawful 28

Such a rule of commerce depends obviously on the worth of athing being based on something other than price and for Aquinasthis extra-monetary referent is human need for which money is anumerical index But this one standard which truly measures allthings is demand This includes all commutable things inasmuch as

Poetry (Norman Okla Pilgrim Books 1983) Money is preeminently the meanswhich becomes an end Money is accumulated want without a referent able to refer toanything or nothing and therefore likely in the absence of anything else to refer to itself(241)

27 For Marxs argument see eg Grundrisse Money is therefore not only the objectbut also the fountainhead of greed (222) For one of the many discussions of greed inthe Middle Ages see Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages trans Rodney J Pay-ton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1996)25-27

28 Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica22 q 77 art 1 trans Fathers of the English Do-minican Province (New York Bezinger 1947) For a lucid discussion of just price theoriesthrough the thirteenth century see John W Baldwin The Medieval Theories of the JustPrice Romanists Canonists and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesTransactions of the American Philosophical Society49 (1959) 3-92 Of the three groups of the-orists Baldwin discusses the former two are fairly characterized as theorists of economicpractice while the latter may be described as theorists of economic ideology Since myconcern here is more with ideology than practice I take the theologians views as the me-dieval norm Also helpful in elucidating these views is Lester K Little Religious Poverty andthe Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1978) and espe-ciallYJoel Kaye Economy and Nature in theFourteenth Century (Cambridge Cambridge Uni-versity Press 1998) For a reading of Chaucers Shipmans Tale in light of the problematicbut nevertheless normative economic ideas Baldwin describes see Lee Patterson Chaucerand the Subject of Histary (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1991)349-65

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

188 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

everything has a reference to human need29 Although Aquinasrecognizes that the specific capacity to satisfy human need is not anabsolutely fixed quality of things-and this presents a theoreticalproblem inherited from Aristotle which he never fully resolves-itnevertheless ought to be determinable and relatively stable andthus prices in ajust world ought to reflect this determinacy and sta-bility Fluctuations in price although expected to some degree in-dicate a departure from the just norm a deviation from the idealmost likely motivated by cupiditas which in this regard is defined asthe desire simply to possess money rather than to use it to satisfy needHence Aquinas distinguishes between using money to satisfy theneeds of life and using it for profit which satisfies the greed forgain which knows no limit and tends to infinity 30Nicole Oresmethe fourteenth-century translator of Aristotle and author of De mon-eta (which was translated into English in the fifteenth century)makes much the same distinction in his description of money as ar-tificial riches in comparison to the natural riches of the com-modities it purchases any desire for purely monetary wealth istherefore vile and unnatural and stems from an individualsgreedy and disgraceful enhancement of his own profit31

I do not mean to imply here that the scholastic attempts to for-mulate a notion of just price represent an ignorance or oversimpli-cation of the nature of a money economy Rather Aquinass notionof just price represents as Joel Kaye has persuasively shown a so-phisticated attempt to reconcile the relativistic implications of amonetized economy with the traditional understanding of an onto-logically ordered universe of graded values where every object andsubject has its fixed place in the order of being from God down tothe least of his creations 32Yet on this topic Aquinass great pow-ers of synthesis do not entirely succeed Instead of forging an un-ambiguous link between divine justice and the dynamics of the

29 Aquinas Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 59981trans C 1 Litzinger (ChicagoHenry Regnery Company 1964)

30 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 431 The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents trans Charles Johnson

(London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1956)2542Oresme is specifically arguing hereagainst the profit-making activity of royal debasements of the coinage which he sees asworse than usury

32 Kaye Economy and Nature 50

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 181

more luxurious than that term now connotes From his study of thewill of john Prophete who was Keeper from 1406-15 A L Brownconcludes that the household that the Keeper maintained with hisclerks was quite elaborate Clearly Prophete and surely the otherkeepers also maintained a large household and it is not surprisingthat Hoccleve worried about the poor cot he would live in when heretired 17 Indeed several times in the Regement of Princes Hocclevemakes clear that his fear over the loss of his income is so powerfulprecisely because he is so used to a relatively luxurious life-see eglines 847967-73 and most explicitly 1220-23

I have had habundanceOf welfare ay and now stond in the plytOf scarsetee it were a greet penanceFor me-God sheelde me fro that streit chance

Living in a lavish household and in his work frequently coming intocontact with aristocrats and even members of the royal family Hoc-cleve had a taste of a gentlemans standard of living that belied hismore income-appropriate socioeconomic association with petty ar-tisans and retailers He knew both what it was like to live like an aris-tocrat and at the same time that such a life was in fact well beyondhis means

Lurking at the center of this ambiguity was for Hoccleve the in-escapable relation between money and his social location He wasentirely dependant on the Privy Seal for his livelihood and we knowfrom his own repeated references to the fact that the most crucialcomponent of this livelihood was his annuitee 18 A semiannual

17 A L Brown The Privy Seal Clerks in the Early Fifteenth Century in The Study ofMedieval Records Essays in Honor of Kathleen Major ed D A Ballough and R L Storey (Ox-ford Clarendon Press 1971)260-81 at 266 Browns conclusion that the clerks dwelt inthe Keepers household was an issue that T F Tout Chapters in the Administrative History ofMediaeval England The Wardrobe the Chamber and the Small Seals (Manchester University ofManchester Press 1930) left inconclusive In regard to the Privy Seal clerks generally in-flated socioeconomic status see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity the very same momentthat had witnessed a crisis of financial insecurity on the part of these clerks also seems tohave witnessed an elevation in their social position (364) For the economic role playedby the aristocratic inn during Hoccleves lifetime see Caroline M Barron Centres ofConspicuous Consumption The Aristocratic Town House in London 1200-1550 LondonJournal 20 (1995) 1-16

18 Eg Ill theschequeer he of his special grace Hath to me grauntid an annuitee Of tw(nti mark whyle I have lyves space (RP820-22)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

182 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

royal grant of a fixed amount this source of income had neither awages direct relation to labor and potential for negotiation nor abenefices long-term stability and independence from labor Thus initself socially ambiguous this source of income was nevertheless ashe himself vividly describes in La male regle the essential element ofHoccleves social identity

Wher was a gretter maister eek than ~Or bet aqweyntid at Westmynstre YateAmong the tauerneres namelyAnd cookes whan I cam eerly or lateI pynchid nat at hem in myn acateBut paied hem as pat they axe woldeWherfore I was the welcomere algateAnd for a verray gentil man yholde

Othir than maistir callid was I neuereAmong this meynee in myn audienceMe thoughte I was ymaad a man foreuereSo tikelid me pat nyce reuerencepat it me made largere of despenseThan pat I thoghte han been MR 177-206

His title of maister and his status as gentil depended not uponanything inherent in his position but upon the fact that he paiedthe tavern-keepers cooks and boatmen as pat they axe wolde Hisannuity made his social status bluntly quantifiable in economicterms he was precisely twenty marks worth of a maister 19 Cor-relatively this meant that being yrnaad a man was inseparable fromthe knowledge that such a monetarily propped status was self-consuming-that his title of maister required him to spend thevery money that produced it And what was even more central toHoccleves great anxiety the disbursement of the money that madepossible this status was utterly unpredictable it was always late often

19 In other words Hoccleves social status was perceived as directly proportional to themoney in his pocket This fact resonates with Hoccleves complaint in the Regement ofPrinces that his wit (or more precisely the wit he is recognized as possessing) is directlyproportional to his silver For althogh that myn heed undir myn hood Was neverewysyit whyl it with me stood So that I hadde silver resonable My lytil wit was sumwhatcovenable (1236-39)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 183

under threat of being suspended and on at least two occasions ap-parently not paid20

Given then both the real unpredictability and indeterminate so-cial status of his annuity an ambiguous social location whose tenu-ous elevation was based to a large degree on the fact that he hadsuch an income and the very public relationship between annuitiesin general and the troubles of his Lancastrian employers it is not atall surprising that Hoccleve s pervasive sense of his own and theworlds instability often seized on the idea of money as its imagina-tive vehicle As he laments in the Regement of Princes immediatelyafter revealing the source of his twenti mark income

Mighte I ay payd been of that dueteeIt sholde stonde weI ynow with meBut paiement is hard to gete adayesAnd that me putte in many foule affrayes RP 823-26

Hoccleves poetry of foule affrayes-ie his miserable distur-bances or fears hence his profound anxiety-derives from his ob-sessive concern with money in an historical context troubled ingeneral with money problems For Hoccleve money was not simplya financial instrument but the natural poetic vehicle for exploring aview of the world whose cracks and seams were beginning to show

Amidst the political social religious and economic unrest of theearly fifteenth century Hoccleve as poems such as the Remonstranceagainst Oldcastle suggest wanted to hold onto a traditional world vieweven though to do so meant seeing much of his world as corrupt Inthis regard Derek Pearsalls description of Langland holds as wellfor Hoccleve his response to the social realities he perceives is al-ways that of a devout Christian who sees all change and transforma-tion as a form of decay and who struggles to comprehend thenature of change within the structure of a traditional mode of

20 See J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 8-9 12-13 for a discussion of Hoccleves annuityas well as the appendix of this book (33-49) listing mentions of Hoccleve in the historicalrecord including each of his annuity payments For a similar reading of the maister pas-sage in La male regle see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity 364 Some critics finding thenumber and extent of Hoccleves financial complaints to belie the typicality and to out-weigh the real gravity of his situation show little sympathy for his obsession See for ex-ample Malcolm Richardson Hoccleve in His Social Context ChauR20 (1986) 313-22

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

184 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

thought 21 Hoccleve was in his struggle to understand his changingworld and his place within it experiencing what sociologists today calla crisis of meaning his own traditionalism did not seem to haveplace for someone in his position22 In this situation an individualmay either reject the reigning world view and search for alternativesor try to discover and even ameliorate what has gone wrong (I use in-dividual agency figuratively here crises of meaning and responses tothem are of course both psychological and social phenomena) Thetradespeople of London for readily apparent reasons frequentlychose the first strategy and in the early fifteenth century their het-erodoxy often took the form of Lollardy23 Such antitraditionalism al-though assuming a quite different form may also be observed amongHoccleves fellow clerks While far from being LOllards these clerksleveraged their novel professional situation to their own financial ben-efit demonstrating a nascent entrepreneurship quite out of keeping

21 Derek Pearsall Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman in Medieval English Stud-ies Presented to GeorgeKane ed Edward Donald Kennedy Ronald Waldron and Joseph SWittig (Wolfeboro NH DS Brewer 1988) 167-85 at 174-75 Strohms characterizationof Hoccleves orthodoxy is unequivocal his text everywhere announces its preferencefor the orthodox and the legitimate in their struggle against adulteration (EnglandsEmpty Throne 146) For a recent analysis of the Regement and the Remonstrance Against Old-castle that suggests how disturbingly clever Hoccleve could be at expressing this politicaland religious orthodoxy see Ruth Nisse Oure Fadres Olde and Modres GenderHeresy and Hocc1eves Literary Politics SAC21 (1999) 275-99

22 For a helpful discussion of this kind of personal and social crisis see Peter L Bergerand Thomas Luckmann Modernity Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning The Orientation ofModern Man (Giitersloh Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers 1995) The condition fora crisis of meaning is that the members of a particular life-community accept unques-tioningly the degree of coincidence of meaning expected of them but are unable tomatch it [T]his discrepancy between is and should appears particularly often if theideals of a life community insist that it should be a complete community of meaning(23) From the evidence of his poetry we can gather that Hoccleve at least wished to ac-cept unquestioningly the traditional world view and just as certainly he-because thatworld view could not really account for him-was unable to match it in all his percep-tions and actions

23 Lollardy had spread rapidly in the City especially among the literate middle classwho now that their own economic failure was threatened resented more than ever thewealth of the Church (Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community 74) InterestinglyNightingale notes on the next page that Robert Chichele one of the aldermen of the Gro-cers Company when its ordinances were translated into English in 1418 commissionedHoccleve to translate a ballad into English This is the poem Furnivall calls An EnglishtBalade to the Virgin and Christ in Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Frederick J Furni-vall et al EETS es 61 and 73 (London Oxford University Press 1970) 67-72

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 185

with the official clerical attitude toward moneymaking In a profes-sion increasingly pervaded by money Privy Seal clerks such asRobert Frye became wealthy in part because they had no compunc-tions about influence-peddling or moneylending24 Perhaps becausehis attempts to make money in this manner failed more often thanthey succeeded-as he himself describes in the Regement of Princes(1499-547) where he complains that clerks are often cheated- out ofthe fee by which they are enticed to pen something favorable to aLord-Hoccleve chose to remain a traditionalist Hoccleve a clericin minor orders who kept up a hope for a benefice for at least tenand possibly twenty years or more responded to a personal and so-cial crisis of meaning by searching for what went wrong

The Idea of Money

Georg Simmel the great turn-of-the-century sociologist offers thefollowing formulation of the idea of money

Money is the representative of abstract value From the eco-nomic relationship ie the exchangeability of objects the factof this relationship is extracted and acquires in contrast tothose objects a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbolMoney is a specific realization of what is common to economicobjects25

From this he derives two important-and bipolar-corollaries Firstas the representation of value that is common to economic objectsmoney foregrounds the differential relativity of value ie the factthat rather than having intrinsic worth each object obtains valueonly in relation to all other objects a relation mediated by the com-mon measurement of price In Simmels words money

24 See Browns discussion of Frye (The Privy Seal Clerks 272-75) and Richardsonscomparison of Frye and Hoccleve (Hoccleve in His Social Context 314-21) as well asTout Chapters in the Administrative History on which both of the former two studies draw

25 Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Money trans Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (Lon-don Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1978) 120 Among alternative theoretical frameworks themost notable is Marxs whose formulation of money as the universal equivalent form issimilar to Simmels His notion of what constitutes economic value is however quite dif-fenmiddotnt See in Capital A Critique of Political Economy trans Ben Fowkes (HarmondsworthPenguin Books 1976) the first 75 pages or so and in Grundrisse Foundations of the Cri-tique of Political Economy trans Martin Nicolaus (New York Vintage Books 1973) thechapttT on money

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

186 Hoccleue and the Apprehension of Money

represents within the practical world the most certain imageand the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being ac-cording to which things receive their meaning through eachother and have their being determined by their mutual rela-tions (128)

Such relativity necessarily entails some degree of awareness of the in-stability or unfixedness of value as the worth of objects as measuredby price changes as the relationships among objects-and betweenobjects and money-change since the value of things has becomedetached from the objects and has acquired an independent exis-tence in a specific substance money can develop interests move-ments and norms that on occasion act contrary to those of thesymbolized objects (165) Second and conversely because moneyis the universal representation of economic value it appears to standabove values differential relativity

By sublimating the relativity of things money seems to avoidrelativity [M]oney as abstract value expresses nothing butthe relativity of things that constitute value and money asthe stable pole contrasts with eternal movements fluctuationsand equations of objects (121)

When apprehended in this manner money obtains the character ofa psychological absolute as llthe absolutely commensurate expres-sion and equivalent of all values money possesses a significant re-lationship to the notion of God (236) The danger here is thatmoney as an absolute means very easily becomes an absolute end-not the mediator of desired objects but the object of all desire

Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its qualityas a means to its convertibility into more definite values sothoroughly and unreservedly developed into a completelyengrossing final purpose governing our practical conscious-ness (232)

In this situation all objects index money rather than vice-versa andthe notion of money displaces God as the transcendental signified-a sin Hoccleve would have recognized as cupiditas26

26 Cf Marxs understanding of money as the lord and god of the world of commodi-ties (Grundrisse 221) For the echo of Derrida in my phrasing here see R A ShoafDante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word Money Images and Reference in Late Medieval

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 187

Whether or not we agree with Marx that the notion of greed is in-separable from the economic function of the money form it is cer-tainly the case that in the Middle Ages cupiditas was increasinglyseen as the most serious of the sins27 The Church of course hadmuch to say about this sin my specific concern here is with greedsrelationship to the clerical understanding of money the prominentfeature of which was the notion of just price For Aquinas whosereading of Aristotle was the point of departure for just price theoriststhroughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

[I]f either the price exceed the quantity of the things worthor conversely the thing exceed the price there is no longer theequality of justice and consequently to sell a thing for morethan its worth or to buy it for less than its worth is in itself un-just and unlawful 28

Such a rule of commerce depends obviously on the worth of athing being based on something other than price and for Aquinasthis extra-monetary referent is human need for which money is anumerical index But this one standard which truly measures allthings is demand This includes all commutable things inasmuch as

Poetry (Norman Okla Pilgrim Books 1983) Money is preeminently the meanswhich becomes an end Money is accumulated want without a referent able to refer toanything or nothing and therefore likely in the absence of anything else to refer to itself(241)

27 For Marxs argument see eg Grundrisse Money is therefore not only the objectbut also the fountainhead of greed (222) For one of the many discussions of greed inthe Middle Ages see Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages trans Rodney J Pay-ton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1996)25-27

28 Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica22 q 77 art 1 trans Fathers of the English Do-minican Province (New York Bezinger 1947) For a lucid discussion of just price theoriesthrough the thirteenth century see John W Baldwin The Medieval Theories of the JustPrice Romanists Canonists and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesTransactions of the American Philosophical Society49 (1959) 3-92 Of the three groups of the-orists Baldwin discusses the former two are fairly characterized as theorists of economicpractice while the latter may be described as theorists of economic ideology Since myconcern here is more with ideology than practice I take the theologians views as the me-dieval norm Also helpful in elucidating these views is Lester K Little Religious Poverty andthe Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1978) and espe-ciallYJoel Kaye Economy and Nature in theFourteenth Century (Cambridge Cambridge Uni-versity Press 1998) For a reading of Chaucers Shipmans Tale in light of the problematicbut nevertheless normative economic ideas Baldwin describes see Lee Patterson Chaucerand the Subject of Histary (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1991)349-65

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

188 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

everything has a reference to human need29 Although Aquinasrecognizes that the specific capacity to satisfy human need is not anabsolutely fixed quality of things-and this presents a theoreticalproblem inherited from Aristotle which he never fully resolves-itnevertheless ought to be determinable and relatively stable andthus prices in ajust world ought to reflect this determinacy and sta-bility Fluctuations in price although expected to some degree in-dicate a departure from the just norm a deviation from the idealmost likely motivated by cupiditas which in this regard is defined asthe desire simply to possess money rather than to use it to satisfy needHence Aquinas distinguishes between using money to satisfy theneeds of life and using it for profit which satisfies the greed forgain which knows no limit and tends to infinity 30Nicole Oresmethe fourteenth-century translator of Aristotle and author of De mon-eta (which was translated into English in the fifteenth century)makes much the same distinction in his description of money as ar-tificial riches in comparison to the natural riches of the com-modities it purchases any desire for purely monetary wealth istherefore vile and unnatural and stems from an individualsgreedy and disgraceful enhancement of his own profit31

I do not mean to imply here that the scholastic attempts to for-mulate a notion of just price represent an ignorance or oversimpli-cation of the nature of a money economy Rather Aquinass notionof just price represents as Joel Kaye has persuasively shown a so-phisticated attempt to reconcile the relativistic implications of amonetized economy with the traditional understanding of an onto-logically ordered universe of graded values where every object andsubject has its fixed place in the order of being from God down tothe least of his creations 32Yet on this topic Aquinass great pow-ers of synthesis do not entirely succeed Instead of forging an un-ambiguous link between divine justice and the dynamics of the

29 Aquinas Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 59981trans C 1 Litzinger (ChicagoHenry Regnery Company 1964)

30 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 431 The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents trans Charles Johnson

(London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1956)2542Oresme is specifically arguing hereagainst the profit-making activity of royal debasements of the coinage which he sees asworse than usury

32 Kaye Economy and Nature 50

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

182 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

royal grant of a fixed amount this source of income had neither awages direct relation to labor and potential for negotiation nor abenefices long-term stability and independence from labor Thus initself socially ambiguous this source of income was nevertheless ashe himself vividly describes in La male regle the essential element ofHoccleves social identity

Wher was a gretter maister eek than ~Or bet aqweyntid at Westmynstre YateAmong the tauerneres namelyAnd cookes whan I cam eerly or lateI pynchid nat at hem in myn acateBut paied hem as pat they axe woldeWherfore I was the welcomere algateAnd for a verray gentil man yholde

Othir than maistir callid was I neuereAmong this meynee in myn audienceMe thoughte I was ymaad a man foreuereSo tikelid me pat nyce reuerencepat it me made largere of despenseThan pat I thoghte han been MR 177-206

His title of maister and his status as gentil depended not uponanything inherent in his position but upon the fact that he paiedthe tavern-keepers cooks and boatmen as pat they axe wolde Hisannuity made his social status bluntly quantifiable in economicterms he was precisely twenty marks worth of a maister 19 Cor-relatively this meant that being yrnaad a man was inseparable fromthe knowledge that such a monetarily propped status was self-consuming-that his title of maister required him to spend thevery money that produced it And what was even more central toHoccleves great anxiety the disbursement of the money that madepossible this status was utterly unpredictable it was always late often

19 In other words Hoccleves social status was perceived as directly proportional to themoney in his pocket This fact resonates with Hoccleves complaint in the Regement ofPrinces that his wit (or more precisely the wit he is recognized as possessing) is directlyproportional to his silver For althogh that myn heed undir myn hood Was neverewysyit whyl it with me stood So that I hadde silver resonable My lytil wit was sumwhatcovenable (1236-39)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 183

under threat of being suspended and on at least two occasions ap-parently not paid20

Given then both the real unpredictability and indeterminate so-cial status of his annuity an ambiguous social location whose tenu-ous elevation was based to a large degree on the fact that he hadsuch an income and the very public relationship between annuitiesin general and the troubles of his Lancastrian employers it is not atall surprising that Hoccleve s pervasive sense of his own and theworlds instability often seized on the idea of money as its imagina-tive vehicle As he laments in the Regement of Princes immediatelyafter revealing the source of his twenti mark income

Mighte I ay payd been of that dueteeIt sholde stonde weI ynow with meBut paiement is hard to gete adayesAnd that me putte in many foule affrayes RP 823-26

Hoccleves poetry of foule affrayes-ie his miserable distur-bances or fears hence his profound anxiety-derives from his ob-sessive concern with money in an historical context troubled ingeneral with money problems For Hoccleve money was not simplya financial instrument but the natural poetic vehicle for exploring aview of the world whose cracks and seams were beginning to show

Amidst the political social religious and economic unrest of theearly fifteenth century Hoccleve as poems such as the Remonstranceagainst Oldcastle suggest wanted to hold onto a traditional world vieweven though to do so meant seeing much of his world as corrupt Inthis regard Derek Pearsalls description of Langland holds as wellfor Hoccleve his response to the social realities he perceives is al-ways that of a devout Christian who sees all change and transforma-tion as a form of decay and who struggles to comprehend thenature of change within the structure of a traditional mode of

20 See J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 8-9 12-13 for a discussion of Hoccleves annuityas well as the appendix of this book (33-49) listing mentions of Hoccleve in the historicalrecord including each of his annuity payments For a similar reading of the maister pas-sage in La male regle see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity 364 Some critics finding thenumber and extent of Hoccleves financial complaints to belie the typicality and to out-weigh the real gravity of his situation show little sympathy for his obsession See for ex-ample Malcolm Richardson Hoccleve in His Social Context ChauR20 (1986) 313-22

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

184 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

thought 21 Hoccleve was in his struggle to understand his changingworld and his place within it experiencing what sociologists today calla crisis of meaning his own traditionalism did not seem to haveplace for someone in his position22 In this situation an individualmay either reject the reigning world view and search for alternativesor try to discover and even ameliorate what has gone wrong (I use in-dividual agency figuratively here crises of meaning and responses tothem are of course both psychological and social phenomena) Thetradespeople of London for readily apparent reasons frequentlychose the first strategy and in the early fifteenth century their het-erodoxy often took the form of Lollardy23 Such antitraditionalism al-though assuming a quite different form may also be observed amongHoccleves fellow clerks While far from being LOllards these clerksleveraged their novel professional situation to their own financial ben-efit demonstrating a nascent entrepreneurship quite out of keeping

21 Derek Pearsall Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman in Medieval English Stud-ies Presented to GeorgeKane ed Edward Donald Kennedy Ronald Waldron and Joseph SWittig (Wolfeboro NH DS Brewer 1988) 167-85 at 174-75 Strohms characterizationof Hoccleves orthodoxy is unequivocal his text everywhere announces its preferencefor the orthodox and the legitimate in their struggle against adulteration (EnglandsEmpty Throne 146) For a recent analysis of the Regement and the Remonstrance Against Old-castle that suggests how disturbingly clever Hoccleve could be at expressing this politicaland religious orthodoxy see Ruth Nisse Oure Fadres Olde and Modres GenderHeresy and Hocc1eves Literary Politics SAC21 (1999) 275-99

22 For a helpful discussion of this kind of personal and social crisis see Peter L Bergerand Thomas Luckmann Modernity Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning The Orientation ofModern Man (Giitersloh Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers 1995) The condition fora crisis of meaning is that the members of a particular life-community accept unques-tioningly the degree of coincidence of meaning expected of them but are unable tomatch it [T]his discrepancy between is and should appears particularly often if theideals of a life community insist that it should be a complete community of meaning(23) From the evidence of his poetry we can gather that Hoccleve at least wished to ac-cept unquestioningly the traditional world view and just as certainly he-because thatworld view could not really account for him-was unable to match it in all his percep-tions and actions

23 Lollardy had spread rapidly in the City especially among the literate middle classwho now that their own economic failure was threatened resented more than ever thewealth of the Church (Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community 74) InterestinglyNightingale notes on the next page that Robert Chichele one of the aldermen of the Gro-cers Company when its ordinances were translated into English in 1418 commissionedHoccleve to translate a ballad into English This is the poem Furnivall calls An EnglishtBalade to the Virgin and Christ in Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Frederick J Furni-vall et al EETS es 61 and 73 (London Oxford University Press 1970) 67-72

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 185

with the official clerical attitude toward moneymaking In a profes-sion increasingly pervaded by money Privy Seal clerks such asRobert Frye became wealthy in part because they had no compunc-tions about influence-peddling or moneylending24 Perhaps becausehis attempts to make money in this manner failed more often thanthey succeeded-as he himself describes in the Regement of Princes(1499-547) where he complains that clerks are often cheated- out ofthe fee by which they are enticed to pen something favorable to aLord-Hoccleve chose to remain a traditionalist Hoccleve a clericin minor orders who kept up a hope for a benefice for at least tenand possibly twenty years or more responded to a personal and so-cial crisis of meaning by searching for what went wrong

The Idea of Money

Georg Simmel the great turn-of-the-century sociologist offers thefollowing formulation of the idea of money

Money is the representative of abstract value From the eco-nomic relationship ie the exchangeability of objects the factof this relationship is extracted and acquires in contrast tothose objects a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbolMoney is a specific realization of what is common to economicobjects25

From this he derives two important-and bipolar-corollaries Firstas the representation of value that is common to economic objectsmoney foregrounds the differential relativity of value ie the factthat rather than having intrinsic worth each object obtains valueonly in relation to all other objects a relation mediated by the com-mon measurement of price In Simmels words money

24 See Browns discussion of Frye (The Privy Seal Clerks 272-75) and Richardsonscomparison of Frye and Hoccleve (Hoccleve in His Social Context 314-21) as well asTout Chapters in the Administrative History on which both of the former two studies draw

25 Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Money trans Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (Lon-don Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1978) 120 Among alternative theoretical frameworks themost notable is Marxs whose formulation of money as the universal equivalent form issimilar to Simmels His notion of what constitutes economic value is however quite dif-fenmiddotnt See in Capital A Critique of Political Economy trans Ben Fowkes (HarmondsworthPenguin Books 1976) the first 75 pages or so and in Grundrisse Foundations of the Cri-tique of Political Economy trans Martin Nicolaus (New York Vintage Books 1973) thechapttT on money

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

186 Hoccleue and the Apprehension of Money

represents within the practical world the most certain imageand the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being ac-cording to which things receive their meaning through eachother and have their being determined by their mutual rela-tions (128)

Such relativity necessarily entails some degree of awareness of the in-stability or unfixedness of value as the worth of objects as measuredby price changes as the relationships among objects-and betweenobjects and money-change since the value of things has becomedetached from the objects and has acquired an independent exis-tence in a specific substance money can develop interests move-ments and norms that on occasion act contrary to those of thesymbolized objects (165) Second and conversely because moneyis the universal representation of economic value it appears to standabove values differential relativity

By sublimating the relativity of things money seems to avoidrelativity [M]oney as abstract value expresses nothing butthe relativity of things that constitute value and money asthe stable pole contrasts with eternal movements fluctuationsand equations of objects (121)

When apprehended in this manner money obtains the character ofa psychological absolute as llthe absolutely commensurate expres-sion and equivalent of all values money possesses a significant re-lationship to the notion of God (236) The danger here is thatmoney as an absolute means very easily becomes an absolute end-not the mediator of desired objects but the object of all desire

Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its qualityas a means to its convertibility into more definite values sothoroughly and unreservedly developed into a completelyengrossing final purpose governing our practical conscious-ness (232)

In this situation all objects index money rather than vice-versa andthe notion of money displaces God as the transcendental signified-a sin Hoccleve would have recognized as cupiditas26

26 Cf Marxs understanding of money as the lord and god of the world of commodi-ties (Grundrisse 221) For the echo of Derrida in my phrasing here see R A ShoafDante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word Money Images and Reference in Late Medieval

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 187

Whether or not we agree with Marx that the notion of greed is in-separable from the economic function of the money form it is cer-tainly the case that in the Middle Ages cupiditas was increasinglyseen as the most serious of the sins27 The Church of course hadmuch to say about this sin my specific concern here is with greedsrelationship to the clerical understanding of money the prominentfeature of which was the notion of just price For Aquinas whosereading of Aristotle was the point of departure for just price theoriststhroughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

[I]f either the price exceed the quantity of the things worthor conversely the thing exceed the price there is no longer theequality of justice and consequently to sell a thing for morethan its worth or to buy it for less than its worth is in itself un-just and unlawful 28

Such a rule of commerce depends obviously on the worth of athing being based on something other than price and for Aquinasthis extra-monetary referent is human need for which money is anumerical index But this one standard which truly measures allthings is demand This includes all commutable things inasmuch as

Poetry (Norman Okla Pilgrim Books 1983) Money is preeminently the meanswhich becomes an end Money is accumulated want without a referent able to refer toanything or nothing and therefore likely in the absence of anything else to refer to itself(241)

27 For Marxs argument see eg Grundrisse Money is therefore not only the objectbut also the fountainhead of greed (222) For one of the many discussions of greed inthe Middle Ages see Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages trans Rodney J Pay-ton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1996)25-27

28 Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica22 q 77 art 1 trans Fathers of the English Do-minican Province (New York Bezinger 1947) For a lucid discussion of just price theoriesthrough the thirteenth century see John W Baldwin The Medieval Theories of the JustPrice Romanists Canonists and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesTransactions of the American Philosophical Society49 (1959) 3-92 Of the three groups of the-orists Baldwin discusses the former two are fairly characterized as theorists of economicpractice while the latter may be described as theorists of economic ideology Since myconcern here is more with ideology than practice I take the theologians views as the me-dieval norm Also helpful in elucidating these views is Lester K Little Religious Poverty andthe Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1978) and espe-ciallYJoel Kaye Economy and Nature in theFourteenth Century (Cambridge Cambridge Uni-versity Press 1998) For a reading of Chaucers Shipmans Tale in light of the problematicbut nevertheless normative economic ideas Baldwin describes see Lee Patterson Chaucerand the Subject of Histary (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1991)349-65

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

188 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

everything has a reference to human need29 Although Aquinasrecognizes that the specific capacity to satisfy human need is not anabsolutely fixed quality of things-and this presents a theoreticalproblem inherited from Aristotle which he never fully resolves-itnevertheless ought to be determinable and relatively stable andthus prices in ajust world ought to reflect this determinacy and sta-bility Fluctuations in price although expected to some degree in-dicate a departure from the just norm a deviation from the idealmost likely motivated by cupiditas which in this regard is defined asthe desire simply to possess money rather than to use it to satisfy needHence Aquinas distinguishes between using money to satisfy theneeds of life and using it for profit which satisfies the greed forgain which knows no limit and tends to infinity 30Nicole Oresmethe fourteenth-century translator of Aristotle and author of De mon-eta (which was translated into English in the fifteenth century)makes much the same distinction in his description of money as ar-tificial riches in comparison to the natural riches of the com-modities it purchases any desire for purely monetary wealth istherefore vile and unnatural and stems from an individualsgreedy and disgraceful enhancement of his own profit31

I do not mean to imply here that the scholastic attempts to for-mulate a notion of just price represent an ignorance or oversimpli-cation of the nature of a money economy Rather Aquinass notionof just price represents as Joel Kaye has persuasively shown a so-phisticated attempt to reconcile the relativistic implications of amonetized economy with the traditional understanding of an onto-logically ordered universe of graded values where every object andsubject has its fixed place in the order of being from God down tothe least of his creations 32Yet on this topic Aquinass great pow-ers of synthesis do not entirely succeed Instead of forging an un-ambiguous link between divine justice and the dynamics of the

29 Aquinas Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 59981trans C 1 Litzinger (ChicagoHenry Regnery Company 1964)

30 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 431 The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents trans Charles Johnson

(London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1956)2542Oresme is specifically arguing hereagainst the profit-making activity of royal debasements of the coinage which he sees asworse than usury

32 Kaye Economy and Nature 50

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 183

under threat of being suspended and on at least two occasions ap-parently not paid20

Given then both the real unpredictability and indeterminate so-cial status of his annuity an ambiguous social location whose tenu-ous elevation was based to a large degree on the fact that he hadsuch an income and the very public relationship between annuitiesin general and the troubles of his Lancastrian employers it is not atall surprising that Hoccleve s pervasive sense of his own and theworlds instability often seized on the idea of money as its imagina-tive vehicle As he laments in the Regement of Princes immediatelyafter revealing the source of his twenti mark income

Mighte I ay payd been of that dueteeIt sholde stonde weI ynow with meBut paiement is hard to gete adayesAnd that me putte in many foule affrayes RP 823-26

Hoccleves poetry of foule affrayes-ie his miserable distur-bances or fears hence his profound anxiety-derives from his ob-sessive concern with money in an historical context troubled ingeneral with money problems For Hoccleve money was not simplya financial instrument but the natural poetic vehicle for exploring aview of the world whose cracks and seams were beginning to show

Amidst the political social religious and economic unrest of theearly fifteenth century Hoccleve as poems such as the Remonstranceagainst Oldcastle suggest wanted to hold onto a traditional world vieweven though to do so meant seeing much of his world as corrupt Inthis regard Derek Pearsalls description of Langland holds as wellfor Hoccleve his response to the social realities he perceives is al-ways that of a devout Christian who sees all change and transforma-tion as a form of decay and who struggles to comprehend thenature of change within the structure of a traditional mode of

20 See J A Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 8-9 12-13 for a discussion of Hoccleves annuityas well as the appendix of this book (33-49) listing mentions of Hoccleve in the historicalrecord including each of his annuity payments For a similar reading of the maister pas-sage in La male regle see Knapp Bureaucratic Identity 364 Some critics finding thenumber and extent of Hoccleves financial complaints to belie the typicality and to out-weigh the real gravity of his situation show little sympathy for his obsession See for ex-ample Malcolm Richardson Hoccleve in His Social Context ChauR20 (1986) 313-22

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

184 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

thought 21 Hoccleve was in his struggle to understand his changingworld and his place within it experiencing what sociologists today calla crisis of meaning his own traditionalism did not seem to haveplace for someone in his position22 In this situation an individualmay either reject the reigning world view and search for alternativesor try to discover and even ameliorate what has gone wrong (I use in-dividual agency figuratively here crises of meaning and responses tothem are of course both psychological and social phenomena) Thetradespeople of London for readily apparent reasons frequentlychose the first strategy and in the early fifteenth century their het-erodoxy often took the form of Lollardy23 Such antitraditionalism al-though assuming a quite different form may also be observed amongHoccleves fellow clerks While far from being LOllards these clerksleveraged their novel professional situation to their own financial ben-efit demonstrating a nascent entrepreneurship quite out of keeping

21 Derek Pearsall Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman in Medieval English Stud-ies Presented to GeorgeKane ed Edward Donald Kennedy Ronald Waldron and Joseph SWittig (Wolfeboro NH DS Brewer 1988) 167-85 at 174-75 Strohms characterizationof Hoccleves orthodoxy is unequivocal his text everywhere announces its preferencefor the orthodox and the legitimate in their struggle against adulteration (EnglandsEmpty Throne 146) For a recent analysis of the Regement and the Remonstrance Against Old-castle that suggests how disturbingly clever Hoccleve could be at expressing this politicaland religious orthodoxy see Ruth Nisse Oure Fadres Olde and Modres GenderHeresy and Hocc1eves Literary Politics SAC21 (1999) 275-99

22 For a helpful discussion of this kind of personal and social crisis see Peter L Bergerand Thomas Luckmann Modernity Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning The Orientation ofModern Man (Giitersloh Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers 1995) The condition fora crisis of meaning is that the members of a particular life-community accept unques-tioningly the degree of coincidence of meaning expected of them but are unable tomatch it [T]his discrepancy between is and should appears particularly often if theideals of a life community insist that it should be a complete community of meaning(23) From the evidence of his poetry we can gather that Hoccleve at least wished to ac-cept unquestioningly the traditional world view and just as certainly he-because thatworld view could not really account for him-was unable to match it in all his percep-tions and actions

23 Lollardy had spread rapidly in the City especially among the literate middle classwho now that their own economic failure was threatened resented more than ever thewealth of the Church (Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community 74) InterestinglyNightingale notes on the next page that Robert Chichele one of the aldermen of the Gro-cers Company when its ordinances were translated into English in 1418 commissionedHoccleve to translate a ballad into English This is the poem Furnivall calls An EnglishtBalade to the Virgin and Christ in Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Frederick J Furni-vall et al EETS es 61 and 73 (London Oxford University Press 1970) 67-72

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 185

with the official clerical attitude toward moneymaking In a profes-sion increasingly pervaded by money Privy Seal clerks such asRobert Frye became wealthy in part because they had no compunc-tions about influence-peddling or moneylending24 Perhaps becausehis attempts to make money in this manner failed more often thanthey succeeded-as he himself describes in the Regement of Princes(1499-547) where he complains that clerks are often cheated- out ofthe fee by which they are enticed to pen something favorable to aLord-Hoccleve chose to remain a traditionalist Hoccleve a clericin minor orders who kept up a hope for a benefice for at least tenand possibly twenty years or more responded to a personal and so-cial crisis of meaning by searching for what went wrong

The Idea of Money

Georg Simmel the great turn-of-the-century sociologist offers thefollowing formulation of the idea of money

Money is the representative of abstract value From the eco-nomic relationship ie the exchangeability of objects the factof this relationship is extracted and acquires in contrast tothose objects a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbolMoney is a specific realization of what is common to economicobjects25

From this he derives two important-and bipolar-corollaries Firstas the representation of value that is common to economic objectsmoney foregrounds the differential relativity of value ie the factthat rather than having intrinsic worth each object obtains valueonly in relation to all other objects a relation mediated by the com-mon measurement of price In Simmels words money

24 See Browns discussion of Frye (The Privy Seal Clerks 272-75) and Richardsonscomparison of Frye and Hoccleve (Hoccleve in His Social Context 314-21) as well asTout Chapters in the Administrative History on which both of the former two studies draw

25 Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Money trans Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (Lon-don Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1978) 120 Among alternative theoretical frameworks themost notable is Marxs whose formulation of money as the universal equivalent form issimilar to Simmels His notion of what constitutes economic value is however quite dif-fenmiddotnt See in Capital A Critique of Political Economy trans Ben Fowkes (HarmondsworthPenguin Books 1976) the first 75 pages or so and in Grundrisse Foundations of the Cri-tique of Political Economy trans Martin Nicolaus (New York Vintage Books 1973) thechapttT on money

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

186 Hoccleue and the Apprehension of Money

represents within the practical world the most certain imageand the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being ac-cording to which things receive their meaning through eachother and have their being determined by their mutual rela-tions (128)

Such relativity necessarily entails some degree of awareness of the in-stability or unfixedness of value as the worth of objects as measuredby price changes as the relationships among objects-and betweenobjects and money-change since the value of things has becomedetached from the objects and has acquired an independent exis-tence in a specific substance money can develop interests move-ments and norms that on occasion act contrary to those of thesymbolized objects (165) Second and conversely because moneyis the universal representation of economic value it appears to standabove values differential relativity

By sublimating the relativity of things money seems to avoidrelativity [M]oney as abstract value expresses nothing butthe relativity of things that constitute value and money asthe stable pole contrasts with eternal movements fluctuationsand equations of objects (121)

When apprehended in this manner money obtains the character ofa psychological absolute as llthe absolutely commensurate expres-sion and equivalent of all values money possesses a significant re-lationship to the notion of God (236) The danger here is thatmoney as an absolute means very easily becomes an absolute end-not the mediator of desired objects but the object of all desire

Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its qualityas a means to its convertibility into more definite values sothoroughly and unreservedly developed into a completelyengrossing final purpose governing our practical conscious-ness (232)

In this situation all objects index money rather than vice-versa andthe notion of money displaces God as the transcendental signified-a sin Hoccleve would have recognized as cupiditas26

26 Cf Marxs understanding of money as the lord and god of the world of commodi-ties (Grundrisse 221) For the echo of Derrida in my phrasing here see R A ShoafDante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word Money Images and Reference in Late Medieval

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 187

Whether or not we agree with Marx that the notion of greed is in-separable from the economic function of the money form it is cer-tainly the case that in the Middle Ages cupiditas was increasinglyseen as the most serious of the sins27 The Church of course hadmuch to say about this sin my specific concern here is with greedsrelationship to the clerical understanding of money the prominentfeature of which was the notion of just price For Aquinas whosereading of Aristotle was the point of departure for just price theoriststhroughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

[I]f either the price exceed the quantity of the things worthor conversely the thing exceed the price there is no longer theequality of justice and consequently to sell a thing for morethan its worth or to buy it for less than its worth is in itself un-just and unlawful 28

Such a rule of commerce depends obviously on the worth of athing being based on something other than price and for Aquinasthis extra-monetary referent is human need for which money is anumerical index But this one standard which truly measures allthings is demand This includes all commutable things inasmuch as

Poetry (Norman Okla Pilgrim Books 1983) Money is preeminently the meanswhich becomes an end Money is accumulated want without a referent able to refer toanything or nothing and therefore likely in the absence of anything else to refer to itself(241)

27 For Marxs argument see eg Grundrisse Money is therefore not only the objectbut also the fountainhead of greed (222) For one of the many discussions of greed inthe Middle Ages see Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages trans Rodney J Pay-ton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1996)25-27

28 Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica22 q 77 art 1 trans Fathers of the English Do-minican Province (New York Bezinger 1947) For a lucid discussion of just price theoriesthrough the thirteenth century see John W Baldwin The Medieval Theories of the JustPrice Romanists Canonists and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesTransactions of the American Philosophical Society49 (1959) 3-92 Of the three groups of the-orists Baldwin discusses the former two are fairly characterized as theorists of economicpractice while the latter may be described as theorists of economic ideology Since myconcern here is more with ideology than practice I take the theologians views as the me-dieval norm Also helpful in elucidating these views is Lester K Little Religious Poverty andthe Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1978) and espe-ciallYJoel Kaye Economy and Nature in theFourteenth Century (Cambridge Cambridge Uni-versity Press 1998) For a reading of Chaucers Shipmans Tale in light of the problematicbut nevertheless normative economic ideas Baldwin describes see Lee Patterson Chaucerand the Subject of Histary (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1991)349-65

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

188 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

everything has a reference to human need29 Although Aquinasrecognizes that the specific capacity to satisfy human need is not anabsolutely fixed quality of things-and this presents a theoreticalproblem inherited from Aristotle which he never fully resolves-itnevertheless ought to be determinable and relatively stable andthus prices in ajust world ought to reflect this determinacy and sta-bility Fluctuations in price although expected to some degree in-dicate a departure from the just norm a deviation from the idealmost likely motivated by cupiditas which in this regard is defined asthe desire simply to possess money rather than to use it to satisfy needHence Aquinas distinguishes between using money to satisfy theneeds of life and using it for profit which satisfies the greed forgain which knows no limit and tends to infinity 30Nicole Oresmethe fourteenth-century translator of Aristotle and author of De mon-eta (which was translated into English in the fifteenth century)makes much the same distinction in his description of money as ar-tificial riches in comparison to the natural riches of the com-modities it purchases any desire for purely monetary wealth istherefore vile and unnatural and stems from an individualsgreedy and disgraceful enhancement of his own profit31

I do not mean to imply here that the scholastic attempts to for-mulate a notion of just price represent an ignorance or oversimpli-cation of the nature of a money economy Rather Aquinass notionof just price represents as Joel Kaye has persuasively shown a so-phisticated attempt to reconcile the relativistic implications of amonetized economy with the traditional understanding of an onto-logically ordered universe of graded values where every object andsubject has its fixed place in the order of being from God down tothe least of his creations 32Yet on this topic Aquinass great pow-ers of synthesis do not entirely succeed Instead of forging an un-ambiguous link between divine justice and the dynamics of the

29 Aquinas Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 59981trans C 1 Litzinger (ChicagoHenry Regnery Company 1964)

30 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 431 The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents trans Charles Johnson

(London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1956)2542Oresme is specifically arguing hereagainst the profit-making activity of royal debasements of the coinage which he sees asworse than usury

32 Kaye Economy and Nature 50

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

184 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

thought 21 Hoccleve was in his struggle to understand his changingworld and his place within it experiencing what sociologists today calla crisis of meaning his own traditionalism did not seem to haveplace for someone in his position22 In this situation an individualmay either reject the reigning world view and search for alternativesor try to discover and even ameliorate what has gone wrong (I use in-dividual agency figuratively here crises of meaning and responses tothem are of course both psychological and social phenomena) Thetradespeople of London for readily apparent reasons frequentlychose the first strategy and in the early fifteenth century their het-erodoxy often took the form of Lollardy23 Such antitraditionalism al-though assuming a quite different form may also be observed amongHoccleves fellow clerks While far from being LOllards these clerksleveraged their novel professional situation to their own financial ben-efit demonstrating a nascent entrepreneurship quite out of keeping

21 Derek Pearsall Poverty and Poor People in Piers Plowman in Medieval English Stud-ies Presented to GeorgeKane ed Edward Donald Kennedy Ronald Waldron and Joseph SWittig (Wolfeboro NH DS Brewer 1988) 167-85 at 174-75 Strohms characterizationof Hoccleves orthodoxy is unequivocal his text everywhere announces its preferencefor the orthodox and the legitimate in their struggle against adulteration (EnglandsEmpty Throne 146) For a recent analysis of the Regement and the Remonstrance Against Old-castle that suggests how disturbingly clever Hoccleve could be at expressing this politicaland religious orthodoxy see Ruth Nisse Oure Fadres Olde and Modres GenderHeresy and Hocc1eves Literary Politics SAC21 (1999) 275-99

22 For a helpful discussion of this kind of personal and social crisis see Peter L Bergerand Thomas Luckmann Modernity Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning The Orientation ofModern Man (Giitersloh Bertelsmann Foundation Publishers 1995) The condition fora crisis of meaning is that the members of a particular life-community accept unques-tioningly the degree of coincidence of meaning expected of them but are unable tomatch it [T]his discrepancy between is and should appears particularly often if theideals of a life community insist that it should be a complete community of meaning(23) From the evidence of his poetry we can gather that Hoccleve at least wished to ac-cept unquestioningly the traditional world view and just as certainly he-because thatworld view could not really account for him-was unable to match it in all his percep-tions and actions

23 Lollardy had spread rapidly in the City especially among the literate middle classwho now that their own economic failure was threatened resented more than ever thewealth of the Church (Nightingale A Medieval Mercantile Community 74) InterestinglyNightingale notes on the next page that Robert Chichele one of the aldermen of the Gro-cers Company when its ordinances were translated into English in 1418 commissionedHoccleve to translate a ballad into English This is the poem Furnivall calls An EnglishtBalade to the Virgin and Christ in Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Frederick J Furni-vall et al EETS es 61 and 73 (London Oxford University Press 1970) 67-72

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 185

with the official clerical attitude toward moneymaking In a profes-sion increasingly pervaded by money Privy Seal clerks such asRobert Frye became wealthy in part because they had no compunc-tions about influence-peddling or moneylending24 Perhaps becausehis attempts to make money in this manner failed more often thanthey succeeded-as he himself describes in the Regement of Princes(1499-547) where he complains that clerks are often cheated- out ofthe fee by which they are enticed to pen something favorable to aLord-Hoccleve chose to remain a traditionalist Hoccleve a clericin minor orders who kept up a hope for a benefice for at least tenand possibly twenty years or more responded to a personal and so-cial crisis of meaning by searching for what went wrong

The Idea of Money

Georg Simmel the great turn-of-the-century sociologist offers thefollowing formulation of the idea of money

Money is the representative of abstract value From the eco-nomic relationship ie the exchangeability of objects the factof this relationship is extracted and acquires in contrast tothose objects a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbolMoney is a specific realization of what is common to economicobjects25

From this he derives two important-and bipolar-corollaries Firstas the representation of value that is common to economic objectsmoney foregrounds the differential relativity of value ie the factthat rather than having intrinsic worth each object obtains valueonly in relation to all other objects a relation mediated by the com-mon measurement of price In Simmels words money

24 See Browns discussion of Frye (The Privy Seal Clerks 272-75) and Richardsonscomparison of Frye and Hoccleve (Hoccleve in His Social Context 314-21) as well asTout Chapters in the Administrative History on which both of the former two studies draw

25 Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Money trans Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (Lon-don Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1978) 120 Among alternative theoretical frameworks themost notable is Marxs whose formulation of money as the universal equivalent form issimilar to Simmels His notion of what constitutes economic value is however quite dif-fenmiddotnt See in Capital A Critique of Political Economy trans Ben Fowkes (HarmondsworthPenguin Books 1976) the first 75 pages or so and in Grundrisse Foundations of the Cri-tique of Political Economy trans Martin Nicolaus (New York Vintage Books 1973) thechapttT on money

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

186 Hoccleue and the Apprehension of Money

represents within the practical world the most certain imageand the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being ac-cording to which things receive their meaning through eachother and have their being determined by their mutual rela-tions (128)

Such relativity necessarily entails some degree of awareness of the in-stability or unfixedness of value as the worth of objects as measuredby price changes as the relationships among objects-and betweenobjects and money-change since the value of things has becomedetached from the objects and has acquired an independent exis-tence in a specific substance money can develop interests move-ments and norms that on occasion act contrary to those of thesymbolized objects (165) Second and conversely because moneyis the universal representation of economic value it appears to standabove values differential relativity

By sublimating the relativity of things money seems to avoidrelativity [M]oney as abstract value expresses nothing butthe relativity of things that constitute value and money asthe stable pole contrasts with eternal movements fluctuationsand equations of objects (121)

When apprehended in this manner money obtains the character ofa psychological absolute as llthe absolutely commensurate expres-sion and equivalent of all values money possesses a significant re-lationship to the notion of God (236) The danger here is thatmoney as an absolute means very easily becomes an absolute end-not the mediator of desired objects but the object of all desire

Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its qualityas a means to its convertibility into more definite values sothoroughly and unreservedly developed into a completelyengrossing final purpose governing our practical conscious-ness (232)

In this situation all objects index money rather than vice-versa andthe notion of money displaces God as the transcendental signified-a sin Hoccleve would have recognized as cupiditas26

26 Cf Marxs understanding of money as the lord and god of the world of commodi-ties (Grundrisse 221) For the echo of Derrida in my phrasing here see R A ShoafDante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word Money Images and Reference in Late Medieval

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 187

Whether or not we agree with Marx that the notion of greed is in-separable from the economic function of the money form it is cer-tainly the case that in the Middle Ages cupiditas was increasinglyseen as the most serious of the sins27 The Church of course hadmuch to say about this sin my specific concern here is with greedsrelationship to the clerical understanding of money the prominentfeature of which was the notion of just price For Aquinas whosereading of Aristotle was the point of departure for just price theoriststhroughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

[I]f either the price exceed the quantity of the things worthor conversely the thing exceed the price there is no longer theequality of justice and consequently to sell a thing for morethan its worth or to buy it for less than its worth is in itself un-just and unlawful 28

Such a rule of commerce depends obviously on the worth of athing being based on something other than price and for Aquinasthis extra-monetary referent is human need for which money is anumerical index But this one standard which truly measures allthings is demand This includes all commutable things inasmuch as

Poetry (Norman Okla Pilgrim Books 1983) Money is preeminently the meanswhich becomes an end Money is accumulated want without a referent able to refer toanything or nothing and therefore likely in the absence of anything else to refer to itself(241)

27 For Marxs argument see eg Grundrisse Money is therefore not only the objectbut also the fountainhead of greed (222) For one of the many discussions of greed inthe Middle Ages see Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages trans Rodney J Pay-ton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1996)25-27

28 Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica22 q 77 art 1 trans Fathers of the English Do-minican Province (New York Bezinger 1947) For a lucid discussion of just price theoriesthrough the thirteenth century see John W Baldwin The Medieval Theories of the JustPrice Romanists Canonists and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesTransactions of the American Philosophical Society49 (1959) 3-92 Of the three groups of the-orists Baldwin discusses the former two are fairly characterized as theorists of economicpractice while the latter may be described as theorists of economic ideology Since myconcern here is more with ideology than practice I take the theologians views as the me-dieval norm Also helpful in elucidating these views is Lester K Little Religious Poverty andthe Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1978) and espe-ciallYJoel Kaye Economy and Nature in theFourteenth Century (Cambridge Cambridge Uni-versity Press 1998) For a reading of Chaucers Shipmans Tale in light of the problematicbut nevertheless normative economic ideas Baldwin describes see Lee Patterson Chaucerand the Subject of Histary (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1991)349-65

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

188 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

everything has a reference to human need29 Although Aquinasrecognizes that the specific capacity to satisfy human need is not anabsolutely fixed quality of things-and this presents a theoreticalproblem inherited from Aristotle which he never fully resolves-itnevertheless ought to be determinable and relatively stable andthus prices in ajust world ought to reflect this determinacy and sta-bility Fluctuations in price although expected to some degree in-dicate a departure from the just norm a deviation from the idealmost likely motivated by cupiditas which in this regard is defined asthe desire simply to possess money rather than to use it to satisfy needHence Aquinas distinguishes between using money to satisfy theneeds of life and using it for profit which satisfies the greed forgain which knows no limit and tends to infinity 30Nicole Oresmethe fourteenth-century translator of Aristotle and author of De mon-eta (which was translated into English in the fifteenth century)makes much the same distinction in his description of money as ar-tificial riches in comparison to the natural riches of the com-modities it purchases any desire for purely monetary wealth istherefore vile and unnatural and stems from an individualsgreedy and disgraceful enhancement of his own profit31

I do not mean to imply here that the scholastic attempts to for-mulate a notion of just price represent an ignorance or oversimpli-cation of the nature of a money economy Rather Aquinass notionof just price represents as Joel Kaye has persuasively shown a so-phisticated attempt to reconcile the relativistic implications of amonetized economy with the traditional understanding of an onto-logically ordered universe of graded values where every object andsubject has its fixed place in the order of being from God down tothe least of his creations 32Yet on this topic Aquinass great pow-ers of synthesis do not entirely succeed Instead of forging an un-ambiguous link between divine justice and the dynamics of the

29 Aquinas Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 59981trans C 1 Litzinger (ChicagoHenry Regnery Company 1964)

30 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 431 The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents trans Charles Johnson

(London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1956)2542Oresme is specifically arguing hereagainst the profit-making activity of royal debasements of the coinage which he sees asworse than usury

32 Kaye Economy and Nature 50

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 185

with the official clerical attitude toward moneymaking In a profes-sion increasingly pervaded by money Privy Seal clerks such asRobert Frye became wealthy in part because they had no compunc-tions about influence-peddling or moneylending24 Perhaps becausehis attempts to make money in this manner failed more often thanthey succeeded-as he himself describes in the Regement of Princes(1499-547) where he complains that clerks are often cheated- out ofthe fee by which they are enticed to pen something favorable to aLord-Hoccleve chose to remain a traditionalist Hoccleve a clericin minor orders who kept up a hope for a benefice for at least tenand possibly twenty years or more responded to a personal and so-cial crisis of meaning by searching for what went wrong

The Idea of Money

Georg Simmel the great turn-of-the-century sociologist offers thefollowing formulation of the idea of money

Money is the representative of abstract value From the eco-nomic relationship ie the exchangeability of objects the factof this relationship is extracted and acquires in contrast tothose objects a conceptual existence bound to a visible symbolMoney is a specific realization of what is common to economicobjects25

From this he derives two important-and bipolar-corollaries Firstas the representation of value that is common to economic objectsmoney foregrounds the differential relativity of value ie the factthat rather than having intrinsic worth each object obtains valueonly in relation to all other objects a relation mediated by the com-mon measurement of price In Simmels words money

24 See Browns discussion of Frye (The Privy Seal Clerks 272-75) and Richardsonscomparison of Frye and Hoccleve (Hoccleve in His Social Context 314-21) as well asTout Chapters in the Administrative History on which both of the former two studies draw

25 Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Money trans Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (Lon-don Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1978) 120 Among alternative theoretical frameworks themost notable is Marxs whose formulation of money as the universal equivalent form issimilar to Simmels His notion of what constitutes economic value is however quite dif-fenmiddotnt See in Capital A Critique of Political Economy trans Ben Fowkes (HarmondsworthPenguin Books 1976) the first 75 pages or so and in Grundrisse Foundations of the Cri-tique of Political Economy trans Martin Nicolaus (New York Vintage Books 1973) thechapttT on money

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

186 Hoccleue and the Apprehension of Money

represents within the practical world the most certain imageand the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being ac-cording to which things receive their meaning through eachother and have their being determined by their mutual rela-tions (128)

Such relativity necessarily entails some degree of awareness of the in-stability or unfixedness of value as the worth of objects as measuredby price changes as the relationships among objects-and betweenobjects and money-change since the value of things has becomedetached from the objects and has acquired an independent exis-tence in a specific substance money can develop interests move-ments and norms that on occasion act contrary to those of thesymbolized objects (165) Second and conversely because moneyis the universal representation of economic value it appears to standabove values differential relativity

By sublimating the relativity of things money seems to avoidrelativity [M]oney as abstract value expresses nothing butthe relativity of things that constitute value and money asthe stable pole contrasts with eternal movements fluctuationsand equations of objects (121)

When apprehended in this manner money obtains the character ofa psychological absolute as llthe absolutely commensurate expres-sion and equivalent of all values money possesses a significant re-lationship to the notion of God (236) The danger here is thatmoney as an absolute means very easily becomes an absolute end-not the mediator of desired objects but the object of all desire

Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its qualityas a means to its convertibility into more definite values sothoroughly and unreservedly developed into a completelyengrossing final purpose governing our practical conscious-ness (232)

In this situation all objects index money rather than vice-versa andthe notion of money displaces God as the transcendental signified-a sin Hoccleve would have recognized as cupiditas26

26 Cf Marxs understanding of money as the lord and god of the world of commodi-ties (Grundrisse 221) For the echo of Derrida in my phrasing here see R A ShoafDante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word Money Images and Reference in Late Medieval

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 187

Whether or not we agree with Marx that the notion of greed is in-separable from the economic function of the money form it is cer-tainly the case that in the Middle Ages cupiditas was increasinglyseen as the most serious of the sins27 The Church of course hadmuch to say about this sin my specific concern here is with greedsrelationship to the clerical understanding of money the prominentfeature of which was the notion of just price For Aquinas whosereading of Aristotle was the point of departure for just price theoriststhroughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

[I]f either the price exceed the quantity of the things worthor conversely the thing exceed the price there is no longer theequality of justice and consequently to sell a thing for morethan its worth or to buy it for less than its worth is in itself un-just and unlawful 28

Such a rule of commerce depends obviously on the worth of athing being based on something other than price and for Aquinasthis extra-monetary referent is human need for which money is anumerical index But this one standard which truly measures allthings is demand This includes all commutable things inasmuch as

Poetry (Norman Okla Pilgrim Books 1983) Money is preeminently the meanswhich becomes an end Money is accumulated want without a referent able to refer toanything or nothing and therefore likely in the absence of anything else to refer to itself(241)

27 For Marxs argument see eg Grundrisse Money is therefore not only the objectbut also the fountainhead of greed (222) For one of the many discussions of greed inthe Middle Ages see Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages trans Rodney J Pay-ton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1996)25-27

28 Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica22 q 77 art 1 trans Fathers of the English Do-minican Province (New York Bezinger 1947) For a lucid discussion of just price theoriesthrough the thirteenth century see John W Baldwin The Medieval Theories of the JustPrice Romanists Canonists and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesTransactions of the American Philosophical Society49 (1959) 3-92 Of the three groups of the-orists Baldwin discusses the former two are fairly characterized as theorists of economicpractice while the latter may be described as theorists of economic ideology Since myconcern here is more with ideology than practice I take the theologians views as the me-dieval norm Also helpful in elucidating these views is Lester K Little Religious Poverty andthe Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1978) and espe-ciallYJoel Kaye Economy and Nature in theFourteenth Century (Cambridge Cambridge Uni-versity Press 1998) For a reading of Chaucers Shipmans Tale in light of the problematicbut nevertheless normative economic ideas Baldwin describes see Lee Patterson Chaucerand the Subject of Histary (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1991)349-65

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

188 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

everything has a reference to human need29 Although Aquinasrecognizes that the specific capacity to satisfy human need is not anabsolutely fixed quality of things-and this presents a theoreticalproblem inherited from Aristotle which he never fully resolves-itnevertheless ought to be determinable and relatively stable andthus prices in ajust world ought to reflect this determinacy and sta-bility Fluctuations in price although expected to some degree in-dicate a departure from the just norm a deviation from the idealmost likely motivated by cupiditas which in this regard is defined asthe desire simply to possess money rather than to use it to satisfy needHence Aquinas distinguishes between using money to satisfy theneeds of life and using it for profit which satisfies the greed forgain which knows no limit and tends to infinity 30Nicole Oresmethe fourteenth-century translator of Aristotle and author of De mon-eta (which was translated into English in the fifteenth century)makes much the same distinction in his description of money as ar-tificial riches in comparison to the natural riches of the com-modities it purchases any desire for purely monetary wealth istherefore vile and unnatural and stems from an individualsgreedy and disgraceful enhancement of his own profit31

I do not mean to imply here that the scholastic attempts to for-mulate a notion of just price represent an ignorance or oversimpli-cation of the nature of a money economy Rather Aquinass notionof just price represents as Joel Kaye has persuasively shown a so-phisticated attempt to reconcile the relativistic implications of amonetized economy with the traditional understanding of an onto-logically ordered universe of graded values where every object andsubject has its fixed place in the order of being from God down tothe least of his creations 32Yet on this topic Aquinass great pow-ers of synthesis do not entirely succeed Instead of forging an un-ambiguous link between divine justice and the dynamics of the

29 Aquinas Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 59981trans C 1 Litzinger (ChicagoHenry Regnery Company 1964)

30 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 431 The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents trans Charles Johnson

(London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1956)2542Oresme is specifically arguing hereagainst the profit-making activity of royal debasements of the coinage which he sees asworse than usury

32 Kaye Economy and Nature 50

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

186 Hoccleue and the Apprehension of Money

represents within the practical world the most certain imageand the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being ac-cording to which things receive their meaning through eachother and have their being determined by their mutual rela-tions (128)

Such relativity necessarily entails some degree of awareness of the in-stability or unfixedness of value as the worth of objects as measuredby price changes as the relationships among objects-and betweenobjects and money-change since the value of things has becomedetached from the objects and has acquired an independent exis-tence in a specific substance money can develop interests move-ments and norms that on occasion act contrary to those of thesymbolized objects (165) Second and conversely because moneyis the universal representation of economic value it appears to standabove values differential relativity

By sublimating the relativity of things money seems to avoidrelativity [M]oney as abstract value expresses nothing butthe relativity of things that constitute value and money asthe stable pole contrasts with eternal movements fluctuationsand equations of objects (121)

When apprehended in this manner money obtains the character ofa psychological absolute as llthe absolutely commensurate expres-sion and equivalent of all values money possesses a significant re-lationship to the notion of God (236) The danger here is thatmoney as an absolute means very easily becomes an absolute end-not the mediator of desired objects but the object of all desire

Never has an object that owes its value exclusively to its qualityas a means to its convertibility into more definite values sothoroughly and unreservedly developed into a completelyengrossing final purpose governing our practical conscious-ness (232)

In this situation all objects index money rather than vice-versa andthe notion of money displaces God as the transcendental signified-a sin Hoccleve would have recognized as cupiditas26

26 Cf Marxs understanding of money as the lord and god of the world of commodi-ties (Grundrisse 221) For the echo of Derrida in my phrasing here see R A ShoafDante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word Money Images and Reference in Late Medieval

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 187

Whether or not we agree with Marx that the notion of greed is in-separable from the economic function of the money form it is cer-tainly the case that in the Middle Ages cupiditas was increasinglyseen as the most serious of the sins27 The Church of course hadmuch to say about this sin my specific concern here is with greedsrelationship to the clerical understanding of money the prominentfeature of which was the notion of just price For Aquinas whosereading of Aristotle was the point of departure for just price theoriststhroughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

[I]f either the price exceed the quantity of the things worthor conversely the thing exceed the price there is no longer theequality of justice and consequently to sell a thing for morethan its worth or to buy it for less than its worth is in itself un-just and unlawful 28

Such a rule of commerce depends obviously on the worth of athing being based on something other than price and for Aquinasthis extra-monetary referent is human need for which money is anumerical index But this one standard which truly measures allthings is demand This includes all commutable things inasmuch as

Poetry (Norman Okla Pilgrim Books 1983) Money is preeminently the meanswhich becomes an end Money is accumulated want without a referent able to refer toanything or nothing and therefore likely in the absence of anything else to refer to itself(241)

27 For Marxs argument see eg Grundrisse Money is therefore not only the objectbut also the fountainhead of greed (222) For one of the many discussions of greed inthe Middle Ages see Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages trans Rodney J Pay-ton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1996)25-27

28 Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica22 q 77 art 1 trans Fathers of the English Do-minican Province (New York Bezinger 1947) For a lucid discussion of just price theoriesthrough the thirteenth century see John W Baldwin The Medieval Theories of the JustPrice Romanists Canonists and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesTransactions of the American Philosophical Society49 (1959) 3-92 Of the three groups of the-orists Baldwin discusses the former two are fairly characterized as theorists of economicpractice while the latter may be described as theorists of economic ideology Since myconcern here is more with ideology than practice I take the theologians views as the me-dieval norm Also helpful in elucidating these views is Lester K Little Religious Poverty andthe Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1978) and espe-ciallYJoel Kaye Economy and Nature in theFourteenth Century (Cambridge Cambridge Uni-versity Press 1998) For a reading of Chaucers Shipmans Tale in light of the problematicbut nevertheless normative economic ideas Baldwin describes see Lee Patterson Chaucerand the Subject of Histary (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1991)349-65

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

188 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

everything has a reference to human need29 Although Aquinasrecognizes that the specific capacity to satisfy human need is not anabsolutely fixed quality of things-and this presents a theoreticalproblem inherited from Aristotle which he never fully resolves-itnevertheless ought to be determinable and relatively stable andthus prices in ajust world ought to reflect this determinacy and sta-bility Fluctuations in price although expected to some degree in-dicate a departure from the just norm a deviation from the idealmost likely motivated by cupiditas which in this regard is defined asthe desire simply to possess money rather than to use it to satisfy needHence Aquinas distinguishes between using money to satisfy theneeds of life and using it for profit which satisfies the greed forgain which knows no limit and tends to infinity 30Nicole Oresmethe fourteenth-century translator of Aristotle and author of De mon-eta (which was translated into English in the fifteenth century)makes much the same distinction in his description of money as ar-tificial riches in comparison to the natural riches of the com-modities it purchases any desire for purely monetary wealth istherefore vile and unnatural and stems from an individualsgreedy and disgraceful enhancement of his own profit31

I do not mean to imply here that the scholastic attempts to for-mulate a notion of just price represent an ignorance or oversimpli-cation of the nature of a money economy Rather Aquinass notionof just price represents as Joel Kaye has persuasively shown a so-phisticated attempt to reconcile the relativistic implications of amonetized economy with the traditional understanding of an onto-logically ordered universe of graded values where every object andsubject has its fixed place in the order of being from God down tothe least of his creations 32Yet on this topic Aquinass great pow-ers of synthesis do not entirely succeed Instead of forging an un-ambiguous link between divine justice and the dynamics of the

29 Aquinas Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 59981trans C 1 Litzinger (ChicagoHenry Regnery Company 1964)

30 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 431 The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents trans Charles Johnson

(London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1956)2542Oresme is specifically arguing hereagainst the profit-making activity of royal debasements of the coinage which he sees asworse than usury

32 Kaye Economy and Nature 50

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 187

Whether or not we agree with Marx that the notion of greed is in-separable from the economic function of the money form it is cer-tainly the case that in the Middle Ages cupiditas was increasinglyseen as the most serious of the sins27 The Church of course hadmuch to say about this sin my specific concern here is with greedsrelationship to the clerical understanding of money the prominentfeature of which was the notion of just price For Aquinas whosereading of Aristotle was the point of departure for just price theoriststhroughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

[I]f either the price exceed the quantity of the things worthor conversely the thing exceed the price there is no longer theequality of justice and consequently to sell a thing for morethan its worth or to buy it for less than its worth is in itself un-just and unlawful 28

Such a rule of commerce depends obviously on the worth of athing being based on something other than price and for Aquinasthis extra-monetary referent is human need for which money is anumerical index But this one standard which truly measures allthings is demand This includes all commutable things inasmuch as

Poetry (Norman Okla Pilgrim Books 1983) Money is preeminently the meanswhich becomes an end Money is accumulated want without a referent able to refer toanything or nothing and therefore likely in the absence of anything else to refer to itself(241)

27 For Marxs argument see eg Grundrisse Money is therefore not only the objectbut also the fountainhead of greed (222) For one of the many discussions of greed inthe Middle Ages see Johan Huizinga The Autumn of the Middle Ages trans Rodney J Pay-ton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1996)25-27

28 Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica22 q 77 art 1 trans Fathers of the English Do-minican Province (New York Bezinger 1947) For a lucid discussion of just price theoriesthrough the thirteenth century see John W Baldwin The Medieval Theories of the JustPrice Romanists Canonists and Theologians in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesTransactions of the American Philosophical Society49 (1959) 3-92 Of the three groups of the-orists Baldwin discusses the former two are fairly characterized as theorists of economicpractice while the latter may be described as theorists of economic ideology Since myconcern here is more with ideology than practice I take the theologians views as the me-dieval norm Also helpful in elucidating these views is Lester K Little Religious Poverty andthe Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1978) and espe-ciallYJoel Kaye Economy and Nature in theFourteenth Century (Cambridge Cambridge Uni-versity Press 1998) For a reading of Chaucers Shipmans Tale in light of the problematicbut nevertheless normative economic ideas Baldwin describes see Lee Patterson Chaucerand the Subject of Histary (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1991)349-65

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

188 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

everything has a reference to human need29 Although Aquinasrecognizes that the specific capacity to satisfy human need is not anabsolutely fixed quality of things-and this presents a theoreticalproblem inherited from Aristotle which he never fully resolves-itnevertheless ought to be determinable and relatively stable andthus prices in ajust world ought to reflect this determinacy and sta-bility Fluctuations in price although expected to some degree in-dicate a departure from the just norm a deviation from the idealmost likely motivated by cupiditas which in this regard is defined asthe desire simply to possess money rather than to use it to satisfy needHence Aquinas distinguishes between using money to satisfy theneeds of life and using it for profit which satisfies the greed forgain which knows no limit and tends to infinity 30Nicole Oresmethe fourteenth-century translator of Aristotle and author of De mon-eta (which was translated into English in the fifteenth century)makes much the same distinction in his description of money as ar-tificial riches in comparison to the natural riches of the com-modities it purchases any desire for purely monetary wealth istherefore vile and unnatural and stems from an individualsgreedy and disgraceful enhancement of his own profit31

I do not mean to imply here that the scholastic attempts to for-mulate a notion of just price represent an ignorance or oversimpli-cation of the nature of a money economy Rather Aquinass notionof just price represents as Joel Kaye has persuasively shown a so-phisticated attempt to reconcile the relativistic implications of amonetized economy with the traditional understanding of an onto-logically ordered universe of graded values where every object andsubject has its fixed place in the order of being from God down tothe least of his creations 32Yet on this topic Aquinass great pow-ers of synthesis do not entirely succeed Instead of forging an un-ambiguous link between divine justice and the dynamics of the

29 Aquinas Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 59981trans C 1 Litzinger (ChicagoHenry Regnery Company 1964)

30 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 431 The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents trans Charles Johnson

(London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1956)2542Oresme is specifically arguing hereagainst the profit-making activity of royal debasements of the coinage which he sees asworse than usury

32 Kaye Economy and Nature 50

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

188 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

everything has a reference to human need29 Although Aquinasrecognizes that the specific capacity to satisfy human need is not anabsolutely fixed quality of things-and this presents a theoreticalproblem inherited from Aristotle which he never fully resolves-itnevertheless ought to be determinable and relatively stable andthus prices in ajust world ought to reflect this determinacy and sta-bility Fluctuations in price although expected to some degree in-dicate a departure from the just norm a deviation from the idealmost likely motivated by cupiditas which in this regard is defined asthe desire simply to possess money rather than to use it to satisfy needHence Aquinas distinguishes between using money to satisfy theneeds of life and using it for profit which satisfies the greed forgain which knows no limit and tends to infinity 30Nicole Oresmethe fourteenth-century translator of Aristotle and author of De mon-eta (which was translated into English in the fifteenth century)makes much the same distinction in his description of money as ar-tificial riches in comparison to the natural riches of the com-modities it purchases any desire for purely monetary wealth istherefore vile and unnatural and stems from an individualsgreedy and disgraceful enhancement of his own profit31

I do not mean to imply here that the scholastic attempts to for-mulate a notion of just price represent an ignorance or oversimpli-cation of the nature of a money economy Rather Aquinass notionof just price represents as Joel Kaye has persuasively shown a so-phisticated attempt to reconcile the relativistic implications of amonetized economy with the traditional understanding of an onto-logically ordered universe of graded values where every object andsubject has its fixed place in the order of being from God down tothe least of his creations 32Yet on this topic Aquinass great pow-ers of synthesis do not entirely succeed Instead of forging an un-ambiguous link between divine justice and the dynamics of the

29 Aquinas Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 59981trans C 1 Litzinger (ChicagoHenry Regnery Company 1964)

30 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 431 The De moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents trans Charles Johnson

(London Thomas Nelson amp Sons 1956)2542Oresme is specifically arguing hereagainst the profit-making activity of royal debasements of the coinage which he sees asworse than usury

32 Kaye Economy and Nature 50

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 189

monetized marketplace he followingly his scholastic predecessorsposits two orders of law governing economic behavior human lawwhich in the scholastic tradition is a loose price control allowingan object to be sold for up to 150 percent of its market value and di-vine law which leaves nothing unpunished that is contrary tovirtue and requires exchange to be governed by the precise justprice as far as this may be determiqed33 Since Christians are com-pelled to obey divine law the normative economic behavior in aChristian economy ought to involve buying and selling at the justprice and yet Aquinas-strikingly-provides no guide for how thisprice may be determined no procedures that is for correlatingprice and human need34 Instead by admitting that a just price is infact not fixed with mathematical precision but depends on a kindof estimate he leaves a conceptual gulf between the exchange valueindicated by price and the normative use value based on humanneed35 This ambiguity encouraged rival scholastics such as Henry ofGhent to found economic value on such more stable conceptualplatforms as natural law in which a dying horse ought to be worthmore than a healthy ass36

Within the late medieval idea of money there is thus a tendency-at least in the more conservative formulations of this idea-towarda kind of Cratylitic version of Simmels formulation in whichmoneys two bipolar characteristics are linked together in a moral

33 Summa theologica22 q 77 art 134 As Kaye puts it But while his emphasis on equality in exchange is clear his model

of equalization is not He never makes explicit in any of his writings how either the equal-ity of things or the just price of a commodity in exchange is actually determined He isuncharacteristically vague on this point (Economy and Nature 96)

35 Summa Theologica 22 q 77 art 1 Baldwin argues at length that in the end the justprice for Aquinas turns out to be the current market price (The Medieval Theories ofthe Just Price 75-80 for a somewhat different view see Kaye Economy and Nature97-100) If this is the case apart from fraud and a few exceptional circumstancesAquinass correlation without an external measure of need reduces to the assumptionthat the marketplace is already the best determiner of need and that in practice thereis no difference between exchange and use value But-aside from the tautology that atleast in part theoretically undermines the notion of just price-that such an ideal mar-ketplace was perceived not to exist is evident from the continued efforts to formulate sucha notion both prior and subsequent to Aquinas A local economy such as Hoccleveswhich experienced dramatic changes in price and crises in money supply no doubt en-couraged many of its clerical denizens to want to find something on which to ground eco-nomic value other than the transient prices of the marketplace

~ti For Hellr of Ghents economic conservatism see Kaye Economy and Nature 101-10

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

190 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

imperative The instability deriving from moneys differential repre-sentationality is characterized as an unjust movement away from itsrelatively stable referent of human need or natural law and moneysown absolute character in respect to what it represents produces anunnatural desire which motivates the former deviation This idea-as an attempt to frame a phenomenon of the social world within thedivine plan for the universe-is an ideology and what is more it isone that as Postan has pointed out mutually reinforced the ideol-ogy of estates

It linked the price system with the divinely ordained structureof society by defining a just price as that which would yield themakers of goods and their sellers sufficient income to maintainthem in their respective social ranks37

For a medieval traditionalist the stability of prices ought to be asnatural and desirable as the stability of the social order Price insta-bility suggested a comprehensive breakdown of this order and thescapegoat explanation of this instability was personal greed ie thecognitive and spiritual error of believing that one needs money in it-self rather than that one uses money to obtain ones needs Never-theless it is important to remember that even for the clerics moneyper se was not evilAs Oresme says-responding to Ovids lines fromMetamorphoses book 1 From earth we mine a source of future ill First iron and then gold more deadly still-that is caused by theperverse greed of wicked men not by money itself which is a con-venience for human intercourse and whose use is essentiallygood38 Finding the way back to this original essentially good useof money in a world where this use has apparently been utterly cor-rupted across all estates (starting with the king) becomes the nos-talgic enterprise of the money-obsessed traditionalist Hoccleve

The Poetry of Money

One of the primary insights of the philosophers of money afterSimmel has been an understanding of moneys structural relation-ship with and influence on other practical representational systems

37 Postan The Medieval Economy and Society 224-2538 Oresme De moneta 5

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 191

such as government philosophy and language Especially in literarymusings on money-asJeanJoseph Goux and many others have ob-served-an apprehension of the structure of money may express it-self analogically in musings on other representational systems andeven in the form of the literary expression itself39 In other wordsthere may be in literary expressions regarding one representationalsystem a spillover into others40 and such spillovers contribute to thethematic and formal complexity of Hoccleves poetry Hoccleve as Ihave argued to this point cannot but have had a heightened appre-hension of the relativistic and absolute character of money and inhis poetry this apprehension inflects his use of other representa-tional systems most particularly his thematic depiction of languageand his poetic form

Hoccleves La male regle at its most instrumental level a beggingpoem-a 448-line petition to the Treasurer Lord Furnival for his be-lated annuity payment-contains in miniature many of the themesand formal strategies he develops on a larger scale in his longerworks As we have already seen in the poems opening stanza Hoc-cleve (albeit playfully) foregrounds his personal anxiety and at thesame time through the figure of the god Health he projects thatanxiety onto virtually every realm of experience By the end of thepoem when he asks What is me and blames his raue on hispoore purse he foregrounds in addition his social isolation and

39 See eg jeanJoseph GOliX The Coiners of Language trans jennifer Curtiss Gage(Norman University of Oklahoma Press 1994) See also his SymbolicEconomies after Marxand Freud trans jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca Cornell University Press 1990) and thework of Marc Shell especially his Money Language and Thought Literary and PhilosophicalEconomiesfrom the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley University of California Press 1982)and The Economy of Literature (Baltimore johns Hopkins University Press 1978) For aprobing application of similar ideas in respect to Hoccleves acknowledged masterChaucer see Shoaf Dante Chaucer and the Currency of the Word

40 Strohm discusses such representational spillover as one of the primary contributorsto Lancastrian unease as illegitmacy in regard to any representational system whether itbe money or sacramental bread reflected the manifest illegitimacy of the nascent dynastyThe Lancastrian program was reliant upon signs and more signs more efficacious morenumerous more motile and transferable Lollards (whose heightened respect for the spir-itual encourages respect for matters stubborn resistance) and counterfeiters (who cyni-cally impose life-giving signs upon inert or dead matter) pose a closely allied if notidentical threat to the Lancastrian symbolic The idea of counterfeit repressed within theorthodox and Lancastrian system is thus projected outward and upon them as enemiesof the transformative sign (Englands Empty Throne 141)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

192 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

the autobiographical form that mimics it and then-paradoxicallyas we shall see-blames this psychological and poetic self-enclosureon his lack of money

Midway through La male regle immediately following the abovementioned passage regarding his dubious social status as maisterHoccleve only apparently puts aside the topic of financial anxietywhen he launches into one of his favorite arenas of representationalspillover and supplies an extended 82-line tirade against the venymof faueles tonge (211)

0 flaterieThe guyse of thy traiterous diligenceIs folk to mescheef haasten and to hie MR 206-8

Here at the beginning of his digression (in the middle of a line)Hoccleve is in fact seamlesslyjoining the cooks and boatmens cash-induced address of maister to the general corrupting influence offlaterie throughout the realm In this way he joins the verbal ex-pression of his own ambiguous socioeconomic condition to themore general problem of verbally unreliable relationships betweenlords and servants kings and counselors and rulers and the ruledThis more general problem is as Hoccleve describes it one of theloss of linguistic trouthe (Men setten nat by trouthe nowadayes Men loue it nat men wale it nat cherice 281-82) he recognizesthat the unfixed medium of language can be misused as a tool ofself-interest the quintessential manifestation of which is cupiditasSimply put Hoccleve realizes that once there is desire for money asin the case of his obsequious cooks and boatmen all linguistic ut-terances become suspect-that whatever those utterances manifestcontent their actual referent is an individuals desire Language par-takes of an inherent representational ambiguity that is not only ananalog for the instability of monetary representation but is indeedan instrument of those seduced by moneys other characteristic itsnature as an absolute manifested in a desire for it as an end

Correlatively in La male regle the absolute nature of money alsoproduces the problem of individual self-enclosure or the inabilitywhether willed or not to escape (or at least to know one has es-caped) from ones singular desire for money into the trouthe of com-mon profit grounded on authentic verbal exchange This problemand its paradoxical consequences become more apparent in the

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 193

passage which immediately follows the Javel digression in whichHoccleve returns once more to his personal financial condition

Be as be may no more of this nowBut to my misreule wole I refeereWhere as I was at ese ynowOr excesse vnto me leefwas and deereAnd or I kneew his ernestful maneereMy purs of coyn had a resonable woneBut now therein can ther but scant appeere

MR287-95

With a terse no more of this now Hoccleve turns abruptly from acritique of the social ramifications of money to his own personal de-sire for money His lament for the loss because of a general desirefor money of trouthe in language society and self-understandingcannot itself escape this desire and thus this lament inevitably turnsinward into the converse lament for his now scanty purs of coynAlthough he recognizes that the desire for money is precisely whatsubverts trouthe he also knows that to be truthful he cannot butadmit that he desires money This paradox deriving from the in-tractable bipolar character of money is in fact the one that governsthe entire poem in La male regle money is both the vehicle and cureof his misreule The only viable treatment for Hoccleves earlierexcesse turns out to be more money specifically the money due tohim of his belated annuity

Significantly the payment or lack thereof of this annuity was notjust Hoccleves personal problem but as discussed above annuitiesin general were problems for each of the kings under whom Hoc-cleve served and with whose administrative details as a Privy Sealclerk he was intimately familiar Moreover this problem was partic-ularly troublesome in Henry IVs early years-during which not atall coincidentally Hoccleve wrote La male regle41 By analogy thenthe annuities that Henry freely dispensed to both friends and ene-mies following Richards deposition signify a political sickness or

41 Burrow (Thomas Hoccleve 15) dates La male regle sometime between Michae1mas 1405and March 26 1406 the date when Hocc1eves belated annuity was finally paid This pay-ment came after a year in which the council and Parliament had suspended all paymentsof annuities because of the ruinous state of Henrys finances

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

194 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

MR446-48

misreule a loss of trouthe for which the only cure seemed to beaccording to La male regleprompt and faithful payment of those veryannuities

By coyn I gete may swich medecyneAs myn hurtes aIle pat me greeueExyle cleene and voide me of pyne

In these lines (the final three of the poem) as in the opening stanzamoney and health are indistinguishable Despite spending nearly afifth of the poem ranting against greed-induced Javel Hoccleve can-not finally reach toward the traditionalist ideal a healthy and stableself and society without also putting his hand out42

Hoccleves Fi1rstenspiegel the Regement oj Princes in the fifteenth

century by far his most widely known work (as the 43 survivingcopies attest) is today most famous for its very long and oddly-ifnot presumptuously-quasi-autobiographical prologue a 2016-line introduction to the advice proper that is in many ways a the-matically more capacious and emotionally more urgent version ofLa male regIe43 In the opening lines of this prologue Hocclevepaints the familiar picture of himself as self-absorbed isolated andradically anxious but in this instance without immediately sug-gesting-except by what may be retrospectively recognized as punson rycher (11) and welthe (I6)-a cause for this conditionother than thoght

This dar I seyn may no wight make his boostThat he with thoght was bet than I aqweyntedFor to the deeth he weI ny hath me feynted

RP 12-14

42 A different way of stating this is that by the end of La male regleHoccleve finally the-matizes an acceptance of what Kaye describes as the ordering effects of individual self-in-terest which is an understanding of natural order deriving from the experience with anincreasingly sophisticated money economy vastly different from the traditional static hi-erarchalone (Economy and Nature 13 and passim) Cf also Knapps reading of the im-portance of the term cravourin this poem (Bureaucratic Identity 375-76)

43 Of course the Regementproper (which I do not really discuss) because it foregroundsthe ethico-poltical and turns the personal into (noteworthy) digression makes the poemas a whole generically if not essentially different from La male regle

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 195

But relatively quickly Hoccleve comes to the money problem Mus-ing on the whims of fortune he notes that those in poore estat(29) possess the consolation that since they are already at the bot-tom of fortunes wheel they can fall no further and this observationtakes him directly to the source of his anxiety

For right as blyve ran it in my thoghtThogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese ImayThan deemed I that seurtee wolde noghtWith me abyde it is nat to hir payTher to sojourne as shee descende mayAnd thus unsikir of my smallyflodeThoght leide on me full many an hevy lode

RP36-42

Thogh poore I be yit sumwhat leese I may Hoccleve is poor andhe has something to lose And at the bottom of this thoght or ap-prehension lies his smallyflode ie his annuity as in La male regleHoccleves autobiographical impulse issues from the unpredictabil-ity of his semi-annual grant the central anxious indeterminacy of hislife Moreover as in the prior poem as soon as he reveals this spe-cific source of his anxiety his apprehension broadens into a percep-tion of a cosmological erosion of stability the flight of an earlierworldes stablenesse

I thoght eek if I into povert creepeThan am I entred into sikirnesseBut swich seurtee mighte I ay waille and weepeFor povert breedith naght but hevynesseAlIas wher is this worldes stablenesseHeer up heer doun heer honour heer repreefNow hool now seek now bountee now mescheef

RP43-49

Already in the first 50 lines of this prologue Hoccleve has estab-lished somewhat more emphatically the same thematic strategy asin La male regle in which the universes problem is Hoccleves spe-cific financial problem writ large44 Hoccleve again longs for a lost

44 For a similar description of Hoccleves thematic strategy see Ferster Fictions of Advice145 and Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 8

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

196 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

ideal but as we shall see can again only address this longing via hisspecific pecuniary need

The device that makes the prologue of the Regement of Princesmuch more capacious than La male regle is the introduction of theOld Man as interlocutor which allows Hoccleve to defer his inex-orable conclusion that more of what makes his life and the worldunstable-money-is the only means of achieving stability Throughthe voice of the Old Man Hoccleve putatively leaves his personalconcerns and the genre of petition behind and mounts a fourfoldattack on the evils of the age a l05-line digression against Lollardy(281-385) 133 lines against inappropriate dress (421-553) the OldMans 154-line confession of prodigality (596-749) and a 210-linediscourse on love and sex (1555-1764) In the latter three cases theOld Man explicitly cites money as part of the problem Inappropri-ate dress affects both the poor who buy clothes beyond their placeand means and the relatively wealthy courtier who exhausts hiswealth on useless and even cumbersome luxuries (what help shalhe Whos sleeves encombrous so syde traille Do to his lord465-67)45 The formerly prodigal Old Man admits that in hispryde and leccherie (648) he wasted his tithe in taverns And mar-riage is now corrupt because it is among other things arranged formuk and good (1632) rather than for love In the case of Lollardythe Old Mans remark that Sum man for lak of occupacioun Musith ferthere than his wit may strecche (281-82) recalls the as-sertion in Hoccleve s Remonstrance against Oldcastle that Lollardycomes about when one neglects ones proper socioeconomic occu-pation ie when in general a society no longer respects thelines between estates For the Old Man then more moneyrather than solving the worlds problems can only make themworse and therein derives the poverty that he both exemplifies andrecommends

45 Paul Strohm Hoccleve Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court in The Cambridge His-tory of Medieval English Literature ed David Wallace (Cambridge Cambridge UniversityPress 1999)640-61 detects an analogy with counterfeiting in this remark of the OldMans since clothing ought authentically to index social location in the same manneras the image of the king on the coin ought to index economic value Reproducing theLancastrian desire for stable reference Hoccleve in the voice of the Old Man goes onto praise John of Gaunts habits of dress which as Strohm puts it were in accord withhis station a guarantee of trouth and authenticity in a potentially inauthentic world(647)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 197

The Old Mans recommendation eventually follows Hoccleveslong-deferred revelation to him of the pecuniary source of hisanxiety (lines 823-26 cited above) Between the two Hoccleve in-serts another deferral offering to his interlocutor a telling counter-digression on the lack of pity for military veterans who Been intopovert falle (921 )-ie a social problem for which money clearly isthe solution Hoccleve then returns to his own situation lamentinghis mere six marks of non-annuity income his fear of retiring with-out a means of support and hence without friends in his poorecote (940) and the fact that all this is made worse by his having ex-perienced a standard of living of greater means He then turns fromhis income to his work telling of the physically taxing and sociallyisolated life of a Privy Seal clerk who must stowpe and stare uponthe sheepes skyn And keepe moot [his] song and wordes yn(1014-15 ) Finally he apologizes for his seIf- and money-obsessedmonologue (I am right sikir it hath been an helle 1034) and asksfor the Old Mans advice The Old Man does not hesitate he spendsthe next 168 lines (1051-1218) arguing for the spiritual and worldlyadvantages of poverty (eg My sone as witnessith holy scripture Discreet and honest povert many fold Commendid is 1072-74])and he concludes that in any case six marks a year is plenty to liveon Of six marc yeerly mete and drynke and clooth Thow getemaist my chyld withouten ooth (1217-18)

Here the poet quite remarkably depicts the Old Man as makinga strategic rhetorical blunder If he had kept his argument at thelevel of the ideal or general he might have turned Hocclevesobsession with money in the same direction which-notwithstandingthe example of the plight of veterans-might have led Hoccleve tosee that his local desire for money has antitraditionalist implicationswhich he cannot reject without also rejecting his desire But insteadby returning to the specific and personal Hoccleves interlocutorcues Hoccleves first-person persona to do likewise Six marc yeerlyto scars is to susteene The charges that I have as that I weene(1224-25) Seemingly ignoring all the other elements of the OldMans argument Hoccleve politely begs to differ in regard to theOld Mans estimation of the buying power of six marks The specificnumeric value of his income and its unstable relationship to what itmay purchase-ie the anxiety of monetary indeterminacy-

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

198 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

remains entrenched in his consciousness despite the Old Mansprior appeals to traditionalist ideology46

Subsequently after a long exchange that includes the revelationof Hoccleves marriage and the Old Mans subsequent discourse onlove and sex the Old Man finally recognizes the ineluctability of thisentrenchment

What sone How now I see weI smal effectOr elles noon my wordes in thee takeOuthir ful symple is thyn intellectOr hokirly thow hast hem overshakeOr thy goost slept hath What my sone awakeWhileer thow seidist thow were of me gladAnd now it seemeth thow art of me sad

I deeme so syn that my long sermounProfitith naght-it sore me repentithFadir beeth nat of that oppiniounFor as yee wole I do myn herte assentithBut ay among fadir thoght me tormentithSo sharply and so troublith and despeirithThat it my wit foule hyndreth and apeirith

RP 1814-27

It is a tribute to Hoccleves literary skill that as these two stanzasshow one may easily forget that Hoccleve is not in fact reporting anactual dialogue instead what Hoccleve actually dramatizes here ishis failure after more than 1800 lines to progress dialectically out-side his own anxiety-ridden and annuity-obsessed consciousness Asin the analogous situation at the end of La male regle the implicationis that the only way out of this consciousness is to delve more deeplyinto it to make his financial need thematically-and practically-comprehensive in order to create the possibility of an imaginary es-cape from the stranglehold of the thoght that so troublith anddespeirith Hoccleves anxiety over the instability of money thusonce more turns for its salve toward that instabilitys bipolar

46 The specific amount of Hoccleves supplemental income appears at least three othertimes in the poem when he first reveals and laments the relatively small amount (935974) and in the Old Mans assurance of its adequacy (1217 cited above)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 199

companion-money as an absolute-producing as a new startingplace the same thematic self-enclosure with which he began

In a sense then the poem starts over with its 262nd stanza inwhich the Old Man finally turns to the question of how Hocclevemight make some money The remainder of the prologue is in thissense the prologue proper as it sets up the immediate framework inwhich the Regement oj Princes is to be read The Old Man first pro-poses that he write a purely instrumental text a money-making ve-hicle devoid of significant content

Now syn thow toldistMy lord the prince is good lord thee toNo maistrie is it for thee if thow woldistTo be releeved Woost thow what to doWryte to him a goodly tale or twoOn which he may desporten hym by nyghtAnd his free grace shal upon thee lyght

RP1898-1904

A goodly tale to inspire Prince Henrys free grace is thus the ini-tial formulation for the Regement oj Princes Yet as we saw in La maleregle such a proposition inevitably produces a spillover from themonetary to the linguistic That is the admission of such self-inter-est in regard to literary (or for that matter any linguistic) utteranceinevitably invokes the problem of Javel hence the Old Man next ad-vises But of 0 thyng be weI waar in al wyse On f1aterie that thowthee nat fownde (1912-13) To forestall such a spillover Hocclevemust produce a text that both makes money and transcends his self-interest and after thirty or so lines of ranting against Javel the OldMan presents his idea for just such a text

Wryte him nothyng that sowneth into viceKythe thy love in mateere of sadnesseLooke if thow fynde canst any treticeGrowndid on his estates holsumnesseSwich thyng translate and unto his hynesseAs humbley as that thow canst presenteDo thus my sone RP 1947-53

Rather than a mere goodly tale Hoccleve must provide a textthat conveys his humble concern for the Princes estates

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

200 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

holsumnesse -that is one that conveys precisely the converseof self-interest Such a tretice can be presumably recognizablygenuine-ie not a form of Javet-and at the same time a vehicle ofself-interest

But how indeed can one tell Javel from trouthe In La male regleapetition masquerading as penitence the situation is simpler thetruth is confessedly self-interested But the Regement oj Princes is apetition masquerading as advice an inherently unstable catachresisof self-interest and selflessness the formal representation of which asprologue and Regement proper only calls attention to its instabil-ity47Faced with this problem near the end of the prologue Hoc-cleve cleverly invokes a third party-one whose recent inaugurationas the Father of English Poetry authoritatively bridges the gap be-tween poetic self-interest and political common profit effectively be-coming a gold standard for both language and the monetaryexchange underlying patronage and thereby possessing what Gouxcalls a monovalent perspective over both representational systems0 maister deere and fadir reverent My maister Chaucer flour ofeloquence (RP 1961-62) Chaucer as many have argued was an im-portant element of the Lancastrian ideology aimed at producing dy-nastic legitimacy as well as a national and centralized government assuch he was from the perspective of Prince Henry the perfect rep-resentative of a selfless poetry immersed in the interests of thestate48 Thus in this invocation of Chaucer the meaning of poetryand the value of the money a patron pays for it may imaginatively co-incide and both linguistic and economic exchange are grounded inthe quasi-transcendental figure of a proto-laureate

47 Several critics have described this volatile combination of petition and advice in theRegement of Princes See for example Antony J Hasler Hoccleves Unregimented BodyParagraph 13 (1990) 164-83 Anna Torti The Glass of Form Mirroring Structures fromChaucer to Skelton (Cambridge DS Brewer 1991) James Simpson Nobodys ManThomas Hoccleves Regement of Princes in London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages edJulia Boffey and Pamela King (London Queen Mary and Westfield College 1995)149-80 Ferster Fictions of Advice and Scanlon Narrative Authority and Power

48 See for example Paul Strohm Saving Appearances Chaucers Purse and the Fabri-cation of the Lancastrian Claim in Chaucers England Literature in Historical Context edBarbara A Hanawalt (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1992) 21-40 John HFisher A Language Policy for Lancastrian England PMLA 107 (1992) 1168-80 andDerek Pearsall Hoccleves Regement of Princes The Poetics of Royal Self-RepresentationSpeculum 69 (1994) 386-411

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 201

YetHoccleve mentions Chaucer only elegiacally the Father fromthe golden age-and implicitly the ideal relationships among poetpoetry and patron-are always already dead49 Hence althoughHoccleves strategic name-dropping allows his poem to jump thegap from the prologue to the Regement proper the subversive specterof self-interest as several critics have shown continues to haunt thematter of advice5o And at one point at least this specter becomesfully incarnate

My yeerly guerdoun myn annuiteeThat was me grauntid for my long labourIs al behynde-I may nat payed beWhich causith me to lyven in langour0 liberal prince ensample of honourUnto your grace lyke it to promooteMy poore estat and to my wo beeth boote

RP4383-89

Having just illustrated prodigality through the exemplum of johnof Canace Hoccleve cannot resist confessing his own and thenusing the occasion predictably but still somewhat paradoxicallyto ask for more money his belated yeerly guerdoun 51 As in Lamale regle Hoccleve can finally only approach a sociopolitical prob-lem with reference to his parallel personal one and his only rem-edy for both is more of what he perceives to be the vehicle of theircause

49 The elegaic construction of Chaucer as Hoccleves poetic father has attracted fre-quent and often penetrating critical comment See eg A C Spearing Medieval to Re-naissance in English Poetry (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985) and morerecently Ethan Knapp Eulogies and Usurpations Hoccleve and Chaucer RevisistedSAC 21 (1999) 247-73 For the early fifteenth-eentury nostalgia for an ideal Chaucerianpatronage see Seth Lerer Chaucer and His Readers Imagining the Author in Late-MedievalEngland (Princeton Princeton University Press 1993)-although Lerer hesitates to in-clude Hoccleve among those most nostalgic for such a patronage

50 Simpsons description of this reappearance is exemplary Mter the dialogue wecannot help but hear the crackle or interference of Hoccleves own voice through theimpersonal statements of moral prescription for a king (Nobodys Man 170)

51 For the significance of this sudden reappearence of Hoccleves historically concretepersona see Blyth Thomas Hoccleve The Regiment of Princes 11 as well as his earlier articleThomas Hocclevcs Other Master Mediavalia 16 (1993) 349-59 at 353-55

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

202 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

In apparent contrast to La male regleand the Regement of Princes inthe multipart poem known as the SeriesHoccleve never mentions hisannuity Highly self-reflexive brooding and fragmented this poemhas often been read as reflecting and helping to produce his recov-ery from his mental breakdown and undoubtedly this is at leastpart of what Hoccleve was attempting52 Yet the macrostructuralform of the poem evokes and the themes of each of its sectionsdwell on the same problems of instability and self-enclosure whichwe have seen to be central to the earlier two more obviously money-preoccupied poems

The Seriesconsists of eight linked texts a) the Complaint which isspoken in the voice of the author b) the Dialogue which is the rep-resentation of a conversation between the author and a friend re-garding among other things the Complaint c) the tale JereslaussWife d) the Christian moralizynge of the preceding tale e) the au-thors translation of the treatise How to Learn to Die f) the abruptconclusion of this treatise in the prose rendering of the Joys ofHeaven g) the tale Jonathas and Fellicula and h) the moralization ofthat tale In this disorderly-but in another sense seamless-poemthe author-narrator figure his friendly interlocutor the first personspeakers of the treatise How to Learn to Die and the narrators of thetwo separate tales and corresponding moralizations each seem topossess a separate point of view especially in regard to their under-standing of the unfolding work Although there are several thematicstrands that run throughout the individual texts the surface struc-ture of the poem is one of preemption deferral and repetition Inthis structure the theme of consolation (provided by the Complaint)is preempted by the theme of literary patronage (the debt to DukeHumphrey which eventually takes over the matter of the Dialogue)and this in turn is preempted by compensation for Hoccleves al-leged antifeminism (which is the putative raison d etreof JereslaussWife) which is then preempted by the Christian allegorization of thefirst tale The sequence then repeats and revises itself with How toLearn to Die being at once the originally intended but deferred ob-ject of literary patronage a type of consolation and a Christian

52 See for example Matthew Boyd Goldie Psychosomatic Illness and Identity in Lon-don 1416-1421 Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue with a Friend Exemplaria 11 (1999)23-52

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 203

moralization-a capacious project that is not surprisingly aban-doned only a quarter of the way through in favor of the brief proseof The joys of Heaven The final Amen of the latter is then only tobe preempted byjonathas and Fellicula an antifeminist mirror imageof jereslauss Wife that ends with what is by then the predictably jum-bled but still very peculiar sequence of the disembowelment of thestorys antagonist a Christian allegorization and an envoy to theCountess of Westmorland 53

Such multiplying and canceling of thematic points of view bringsto the foreground both the unreliability and inescapability of liter-ary mediation despite the moralizations gesture toward an extralit-erary absolute the Series as a whole remains both enigmatic andtrapped within itself In the context of his earlier poems thismacrostructural form may be understood as an extended analogy ofthe bipolar character of money On the one hand the themes of thepoem rise and fall as prices did in the turbulent economy of Hoc-cleves London On the other hand since at the end of this non-pro-gressive and self-canceling poem all we are left with is the poemitself the means of literary communication have in effect taken theplace of its end and the absolute solipsism of the author rather thanChristian doctrine has established itself as the gold standard54

More important however than the precedent of his prior poemsfor establishing this analogy are the local thematic moments within

53 For a similar understanding (but to a different end) of the Series as a competitionamong texts see James Simpson Madness and Texts Hocc1eves Series in Chaucer andFifteenth-Century Poetry ed Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London Kings College Lon-don 1991) 15-29 Also similar is Haslers notion in Hocc1eves Unregimented Body ofHocc1eves thoughty text For a reading of the Canterbury Tales as a sequence governedby preemption or quitting (a sequence which was quite likely Hocc1eves model) see LeePatterson No Man His Reson Herde Peasant Consciousness Chaucers Miller and theStructure of the Canterbury Tales in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain1380-1530 ed Lee Patterson (Berkeley University of California Press 1990) 113-55

54 On this literary solipsism see Goldie Psychosomatic Illness The reasoning [of theDialogue] returns the argument of the poem back to a solitary and private person Hoc-c1eve himsdf Ironically the Dialogue although ostensibly a dialogue insists upon singu-larity (50) Another indication of this solipsism is the tendency of each of the voices inthe Series to resemble the one Hocc1eve depicts as his own Reading this aspect of his po-etry as a defect J A Burrow Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages The Case ofThomas Hoccleve Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982) 389-412 conc1udes thatHocc1eve entirely lacked his master Chaucers ability to speak in voices other than hisown (402) This assessmen t aside we can recognize the aptness of Hocc1eves distinctivevoice for the themes that dominate his poetry

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

204 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

each of the Seriess sections which reinforce the impression we get ofthe poem as a whole Most explicitly Hoccleve cannot help rela-tively early in the Dialogue bursting into an almost hundred-line di-gression on coin-clipping and counterfeiting

But freend among the vices pat right nowReherced I one of hem dar I seyeHath hurt me sore and I woot well ynowSo hathe it rna which is feeble moneye55

The vices that Hoccleve reherced thirty lines before-murderextortion theft coin-clipping heresy and false pleading-werewhat he was comparing unfavorably to the viceof his mental break-down Coin-clipping (predictably) is the one that sticks in his mindBy the time he trips over the multiple meanings of benefice in theimmediately preceding stanza in which he thanks God for therestoration of his mental health he cannot but recall what God didnot bring him-namely the ecclesiastical benefice that would havebeen one means of bringing him financial stability the lack of whichunderlies his complaint to the god Health in La male regleand thatmay well have been the reason for his mental breakdown if he infact had one56 In the stanzas preceding the coin-clipping digres-sion then his personal experience with money and the relationshipof such experience to general social and religious issues-ie someof the most crucial matter of his previous poetry-gather an onlytemporarily occulted thematic momentum

Indeed with the coin-clipping digression in mind we can see

55 Cited from the Edited Text 99-102 in Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue edJ A Burrow EETS 313 (Oxford Oxford University Press 1999) All subsequent citationsof the Complaint (Com) and Dialogue (Dia) are from this edition using the Edited Textwhere available I have not reproduced the italicized indications of expansion and haveoccasionally altered the punctuation For the unique textual situation that motivated Bur-row to produce an edition of just the first two sections of the Series as well as to provideboth a manuscript transcript and a reconstructed text of what he calls the Variant Origi-nal through the first 252 lines of the Dialogue see his introduction ix-x lxiii-lxv I havealso consulted Hoccleves Works The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et aI and Thomas Hoc-cleves Series An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V iii 9 ed Mary Ruth Pryor (PhD dis-sertation University of California at Los Angeles 1968)

56 Most scholars now believe that he had such a breakdown based on the fact that somuch of what else he saysabout himself can be definitely accounted for in the historicalevidence See for example Burrow Thomas Hoccleve 22 Hoccleve admits to long desiringa benefice in the Regement 1450-56

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 205

retrospectively that the opening of the Series does not just convey aBoethian view of a sublunary world in flux-

For fresshly broghte it to my remembrancepat stablenesse in this world is ther none

Com 8-9

-or the social ostracism subsequent to Hoccleves mental break-down-

For thogh pat my wit were hoom come ageynMen wolde it nat so vndirstonde or takeWith me to delen hadde they desdeyne

Com 64-66

-but also the socioeconomic instability and social isolation he ex-perienced prior to his breakdown and which he explained in Lamale regleand the Regement oj Princes as deriving from money As theComplaint proceeds this convergence of pre- and post-breakdownconcerns becomes gradually more apparent For example midwaythrough the Complaint he describes the mechanism of his social os-tracism as a failure of language-or more precisely the failure toachieve an authentic linguistic exchange

And this I deemed weIand kneew weI eekWhatso pat euere I sholde answere or seyeThey wolden nat han holde it worth a leek

Com 141-43

Whatever Hoccleve saysto testify to his sanity is not believed-valuedat less than a leek-and even taken as evidence of his continuedinsanity His language in other words is considered counterfeitThis problem-a more radical version of the problem of Javel in Lamale regleand the ampgement oj Princes-later becomes in the self-ref-erential trickery of the Dialogue explicitly a failure literary commu-nication Hoccleves friend as Hoccleve complains fails tounderstand the intent of the Complaint

0 what is yow freend benediciteeRight now whan Iyow redde my conpleynteMade it nat mynde it standith weI with me

Com 316-18

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

206 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

And this accusation as the conversation continues extends to theliterary debate surrounding Hoccleves earlier poem the Letter ofCupid which the friend eventually admits not even to have read

The book concludith for hem is no nayVertuously [ie it is profeminist] my good freend

dooth it natThomas I noot for neuere it yit I say

Dia 779-81

Not only is Hoccleves everyday speech taken to be counterfeit buthis past and present literary efforts are either misread or ignored

In the coin-clipping digression Hoccleve neatly and powerfullycorrelates these personally experienced failures of verbal and liter-ary exchange with the failure of money to be a trustworthy mediumof economic exchange Complaining that the poor have no choicebut to accept clipped coins for their labor he laments that the pos-session of such flawed coins precludes them from further participa-tion in economic exchange

How shal the poore do if in his holdNo more moneye he ne haue at allParcas but a noble or halpeny of goldAnd it so thynne is and so narw and smalpat men theschaunge eschuen oueralNat wole it go but moche he theron leeseHe moot do so he may noon othir cheese

Dia 120-26

Just as others consider Hoccleves attempts at verbal explanation notworth a leek men th [e] eschaunge eschuen of the clipped coinsof the poor-a group whose preemiment member as he reveals inthe immediately following lines is himself I myself in this cas been haue or this Wherfore I knowe it a greet deel the bet(Dia 127-28) For Hoccleve then a clipped coin is in regard to therespective exchanges they mediate analogous to his tainted lan-guage they both isolate the possessor and draw attention to the un-derlying instability of their respective representational systems

Although for some critics the coin-clipping tirade is the poemsmain blemish or just one of the expected satirical digressionsprompted by certain inevitable foci in the conversation in my

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 207

reading it is in a sense the poems displaced thematic center57 Ide-ally to ensure the stability of prices over time and place and therebyalso the justness of prices the value of coins ought to be as Oresmepassionately argues permanently fixed But the fact that coins couldbe and were debased was not only a thorn in the just-price theoristssides and a problem for Hoccleves rulers and contemporaries butalso a disruption of his personal financial insecurity that hath hurt[him] sore 58 More so than anything in La male regle or the Regementof Princes coin-clipping encapsulates in one notion the psychologi-cal practical and ideological ramifications of the instability inher-ent in the representation of economic value

As in those earlier poems Hoccleve does not limit his digressionto a condemnation of a specific pecuniary problem but relentlesslyextends that condemnation outward In answer to his own questionWhat causith trowen yee al this mischaunce (Dia 148) he re-sponds it is the maintenaunce Of grete folk which is greet

57 J A Burrow Hoccleves Series Experience and Books in Fifteenth-century Studies edRobert F Yeager (Hamden Conn Archon Books 1984) 259-73 at 263 and D CGreetham Self-Referential Artifacts Hoccleves Persona as a Literary Device ModernPhilology 86 (1989) 242-51 at 249 respectively Given that in his recent edition of the Di-alogue Burrow supplies extensive notes for and devotes an entire excursus to the coin-elip-ping passage (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 89-93 120-24) his criticalopinion of it may well have changed For discussions of this passage in line with mine seeStrohm Englands Empty Throne 141-48 David Mills The Voices of Thomas Hocclevein Essays on Thomas Hoccleve ed Catherine Batt (London Centre for Medieval and Re-naissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London 1996)85-107 at 103-4 and Robert W Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace Representa-tions of Prince and Poet in Late Medieval English Court Poetry (PhD dissertationPrinceton University 1995)208-10

58 In addition to the reminting statute of 1421 mentioned in the Dialogue (for the for-mal significance of which see below) theremiddot is a great deal of evidence indicating that de-based coinage seemed an urgent problem-both for the English in general and Hocclevein particular-immediately prior to and during the time of the composition of the SeriesBurrow collects a wealth of pertinent historical data in the small space of his editionsthird excursus (Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 120-24) Allmand discusses thespecific problem of the debased coinage flowing west from Paris which stymied Henry Vsattempt to lower the costs of his conquests by having Normandy pay for itself See for ex-ample Henrys decision to coin money at Rouen so that les gens dEglise aient mieulxde quoy vivre et vaquer au service divin les nobles nous puissent plus aisement servir etsustenir leurs estas et que marchandise et autres fais de tous nos subges se puissentmieulx conduire (no 1058 in Roles normands et fran~ais et autres pieces tirc~~esdesarchives de Londres par Brequigny en 1764 1765 et 1766 Mbnoires de la Societe des Anti-quaires de Normandie 1e serie 3 [1858] at 189) As Allmand puts it Henry was insistinghere that an (s(ntial eknHllt of a stable society was a stable currency (Henry V 402)

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

208 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

harm and routhe (Dia 150-51) I read this as asserting that behindthe rampant numismatic improprieties of his day lies specifically thebarons practice of keeping large numbers of paid retainers59 De-based money in other words derives from what Hoccleve perceivesto be a debased bastard feudalism the corruption of the ideal in re-gard to one element of economic experience corresponds to thecorruption of the ideal in the entire socioeconomic sphere By theconclusion of the digression this corruption extends even to theoverthrow of trouthe itself

But if this stynkyng errour be correctpat so moche of this land shal be infecteTherwith pat trouthe shal ado un be throweAnd pat cursid falshede it ouergrowe

Dia 193-96

With this threatened reign of cursid falshede Hoccleve as in Lamale regledepicts a crisis cosmological in scope but in this case hedoes it by showing how a specifically numismatic trauma cuts acrossall dimensions of human experience

That this depiction rather than being an instance of aesthetic fail-ure is instead a formal tour de force becomes apparent when we re-alize that its jarringly digressive form-so characteristic ofHoccleve-is coin-clippings poetic analogy numismatic trauma isparalleled by narrative trauma the clipped coin with the fracturedpoem Moreover for some inscrutable reason-I would like to thinkto underscore the thematic role of the digressive form-Hocclevefractures the fracture dropping a stanza midway into the passagethat abruptly announces itself as a revisionary aside written at a latertime

59 Hoccleves condemnation of this practice culminates in the rather threatening dec-laration Nowmaintenours be waar now of a fal (158) But in the very next line-everaware of the local exchange between poet and patron-he hastens to add I speke of nopersone in special which we can only read as a half-hearted attempt to forestall anyhackles the threat might raise among his noble readership Such a defensive posture sug-gests 1 believe that the poet is indeed referring to maintenaunce in the sense I giveabove ie MED maintenaunce n 1(b) Burrow reads the term however in its more gen-eral sense of abetting a wrong or wrongdoer ie MED maintenaunce n 2(b) (ThomasHoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 92 note to line 150) But regardless of its specific mean-ing in this instance the term as the MED makes clear frequently if not characteristicallyconnoted some unsanctioned monetary relationship

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE

Whan I this wroot many men dide amisThey weyed gold vnhad auctoriteeNo statut maad was thanne as now isBut syn gold to weye charged now been weResoun axith pat it obeied beNow tyme it is vnto weightes vs drawe8yn pat the parlement hath maad it a lawe

Dia 134-40

209

Hoccleve here refers to a 1421 statute requiring all corrupt coins tobe reminted6o Temporally but also thematically jarring this stanzabriefly interrupts Hoccleves tirade initially to refocus (retroactively)his rancor on the coin weighers who dide amis vnhad auctori-tee-to those who unofficially demonstrated precisely how illegiti-mate his coins were and presumbably refused them In contrast thelater official charge to weigh coinage as the subsequent and suddennote of Boethian resignation in the last four lines of this stanza sug-gests must have meant for Hoccleve at once the renewed opportu-nity for exchange (not to mention the possibility of a nationalfinancial recovery) as well as the likelihood of personal financialloss The stanza in short meditates on representational pitfallswhile it itself formally produces one For Burrow this stanza as anuntimely reminder of [the poems] textual character is an embar-rassment61 But while this description is entirely apt Burrows nega-tive critical evaluation leaves out the possibility that an untimelyreminder of the poems textuality-that is its very participation inthe representational dynamics which it thematizes-is in this casethe effect Hoccleve seeks

I need not dwell at this point on the further analogies betweenthe failure of linguistic exchange of one sort or another and coin-clipping it suffices to point out that in the Series the spillover fromone representational system to another works in the opposite direc-tion of the earlier poems ie from language to money rather thanvice-versa The Complaint-Dialogue sequence is thus a kind of La male

60 This is the eleventh statute of the Parliament of May 2 1421 Burrow gives the fulltext of this statute in his excursus Thomas Hoccleves Complaint and Dialogue 122-23

61 Burrow Hoccleves Series 263 But see my comment above regarding Burrows pos-sibly changed opinion Burrow has in fact paid more attention to this stanza than anyother reader of Ilocdeve

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

210 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

regie turned inside out in which the latters digression on avel in apoem obsessed with money becomes the formers digression oncoin-clipping in a poem obsessed with language Moreover as I havealready suggested Hoccleves anxiety in regard to the instability of arepresentational system inevitably reinforces his sense of self-enclosure as is evident in the Complaint in his response to his lan-guages loss of social currency Because whatever he says is held notworth a leek Hoccleve locks up his tongue and throws away thekey keeping himself cloos or shut up within himself

Forwhy as I had lost my tonges keyeKepte I me cloos and trussid me my weyeDroupynge and heuy and al wo bistadSmal cause hadde I me thoghte to be glad

Com 144-47

This social withdrawal culminates in the Complaints much-discussedmirror passage in which he stares at his reflection telling himself

This contenance I am seur and this cheereIf I foorth vse is no thyng repreeuableTo hem pat han conceites resonable Com 166-68

For a moment he seems convinced that because he can make his re-flection appear normal to his own gaze-his contenance [be]no thyng repreeuable-he will appear sane to and be accepted byothers Yet in the next moment he realizes that an authentic knowl-edge of his own appearance is finally not available to him

Men in hire owne cas been blynde aldayAs I haue herd seyn many a day agoonAnd in pat same plyt I stonde mayHow shal I do which is the beste wayMy troublid spirit for to brynge in reste

Com 170-74

Because men in [regard to J hire owne cas are blind Hoccleve sus-pects that any individual try as he might cannot transcend himselfby trying to undo his social ostracism Hoccleve discovers the radicalisolation of individual subjectivity As one critic concludes There isnothing psychological about Thomass madness in the Complaintnevertheless the crisis of madness promotes psychology as its

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 211

consequence 62 But this psychology it is important to remembercomes at the cost of the failure of linguistic exchange and thereforeit is at once his epistemological consolation and a concomitant con-dition of self-enclosure from which he wishes to escape-a paradox-ical situation much like the bipolar character of his pecuniarydistress in La male regle and the Regement of Princes 63

The remaining texts of the Series obsessively return to the formaland thematic concerns of the first two sections64 The tale of Jeres-lauss Wife--a Constance-like story taken from the Gesta romanorum-is propelled by the titular protagonists attempts to keep her vow toher Emperor husband by uttering no to a series of male antago-nists Each of these utterances not only fails to produce its intended

62 George MacLennan Lucid Interval Subjective Writing and Madness in History (Leices-ter Leicester University Press 1992)23 See also Epstein At the Stremes Hed of Grace204

63 In this discussion of mirrors language and identity Lacans notion of the mirrorstage is strongly suggested And indeed the constitution of the subject specularly as al-ways already self-alienated seems to correspond to Hoccleves experience of seeing in hisreflection the man he longs to be and thereby becoming aware of his subjectivity In facthowever the formulations are the inverses of each other Lacans notion is the first stepout of a primary narcissism into a socially constituted subjectivity while Hoccleves is a fallfrom a psychology-free version of the latter into a socially enforced version of the formerLacan in other words explains how the subject arrives already half-eonstituted into thesocial while Hoccleve describes a fall from an asubjective social into socially ostracizedsubjectivi ty

64 All citations ofjereslauss Wife (Jer) and Jonathas and Fellirula (Jon) are from HoccleuesWorks The Minor Poems ed Furnivall et al by line number I have not reproduced Furni-valls emendation brackets his diacritical marks nor his indications of expansion Al-though I do not discuss How to Learn to Die in this essay one may easily see how amongother things its relentlessly self-enclosed structure evokes the character of the rest of theSeriesNot only is this section deferred until it can be sandwiched (without comment) be-tween the mirroring narratives of Jereslauss Wife and Jonathas and Fellicula but its own nar-rative as the following outline shows is one of progressive interiorization

Hoccleve (or some first-person speaker) addresses Wisdom

Wisdom speaksWisdoms disciple (a third-person speaker) answers and imagines a dying man

The disciple and the dying man have a discourse on deathThe dying man dies and goes to hell

Disciple cries out to WisdomWisdom answers

Hoccleve gives up the translation after just the first part

Once again Hocckve attempts to solve a problem-in this case self-enclosure-in apoetic form that mimics it

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

212 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

effect but also has disastrous exacerbating consequences Thesepractical failures of linguistic trouthe culminate in the Empresss cap-ture by the Shipman (who has paid her servant to lie to her) Mterinsisting on her vow to Jereslaus and once more uttering no to theShipmans announced erotic intentions and after he responds bytelling her to Keepe in thywordes womman (er631) on the painof being cast into the sea she assents to his will-after a fashion Infact she saysshe assents only to buy time and privacy to pursue a dif-ferent kind of linguistic trouthe-a prayer to our Lord Ihesu ourSaueor asking him to keep her this hour ffrom al pollucion(Jer 659-62) In this case her language is effective a tempest destroysthe ship and she is saved This outcome prefigures the climax of thetale in which another divinely instituted form of linguistic ex-change-the confession-appears to redeem the narrative The Em-press becomes both victim and confessor and her principalantagonists her penitents the entire tale is renarrated through theirconfessions and concludes with the healing and redemption of allDespite a possible unease with the Empresss own use of verbal de-ception and the conventional but still disturbing concluding line onthe universality of death-And whan god list also dye shul we (Jer952)-it appears that Hoccleve has finally found an efficacious po-etic vehicle for his traditionalism the orthodoxy of auricular con-fession a divinely stable language that redeems linguistic and byanalogy all other forms of exchange

Jonathas and Fellicula the companion tale to Jereslauss Wife doesmuch however to shake this confidence Like the tale of the Em-press the plot of Jonathas and Fellicula is propelled by repeated sub-versions of authentic linguistic exchange and in this case linguisticdeception more explicitly appears as a spillover of cupiditas Eachtime the protagonistJonathas inexplicably attracts wealth to himselfFellicula persuades him to confess the source of his magnetism andthen lies to him in order to steal it Later stranded at the worldesende (Jon 386) because he quite unwisely confesses the means of hisown attempt to deceive the deceiver Jonathas embarks on a peni-tential journey that seemingly sets up the tale for a climax parallel tothat of Jereslauss Wife As in the earlier tale Jonathas ultimatelybecomes a priest-figure to whom Fellicula confesses the crimesthat make up the body of the story But this time the result is quitedifferent

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

ROBERT J MEYER-LEE 213

Now herkneth how it hire made smerteHir wombe opned and out fil eche entrailleThat in hire was thus seith the booke sanz faill

Jon 663-65

In light of what Jonathas promised Fellicula would be the outcomeof her confession middotmiddotAndyee shul been al hool y yow byheete (jon625) it is difficult not to read the actual result asJonathass misuseof language toward the most violent of ends Such also seems to beHoccleves reading when he writes the puzzling line Thus wrec-chidly 10 this gyle man dyde (jon 666) 65 In the conclusion of theearlier tale by providing the figure of a faithful effective priest whopossesses no trace of self-interest-that is by conjuring up a con-crete social identity unambiguously fixed in his traditionalist ideal-Hoccleve imagines an escape from the grip of socioeconomic andlinguistic insecurity and its concomitant self-enclosure But in starkcontrast in the conclusion of Jonathas and Fellicula he imagines thebest-which is also the worst-that he may achieve without such anescape the revenge of a bumbling man driven by inescapable de-sire on those who would keep him from his wealth

65 Literally this line in modern English reads Thus wretchedly 10 this guile mandied Furnivall attempting to repair the sense emends the holographs man towoman and assumes Middle English gyle can mean guilely Pryor in her edition ofthe same manuscript follows Furnivall This emendation however adds an eleventh syl-lable (assuming a pronounced final e for gyle and a silent one for the line-endingdyde) and destroys the meter Moreover the MED lists no instances of an adjectival useof gyle the closest case is gyly (MED gili adj) and this is rare with only one attesta-tion ca 1475 (much more common are gileful gilesum and middotgilous) And Hocclevehimself uses gyle unambiguously as a noun earlier in the tale (238) William Browne ofTavistock in his early seventeenth-eentury modernizing of jon athas andFellicula (which hetook from the same manuscript) solves the problem by coining a new substantive guile-man meaning-according to the editor of Brownes poems as well as the OED-be-guiler of men ie Fellicula (see OED guile sb 3 citing this instance and the FirstEclogue of The Shepherds Pipe in The Poems of William Browne of Tavistock ed Gordon Good-win 2 [London Lawrence amp Bullen 1894] line 718) Interestingly another manuscriptof the Series (Yale Beinecke MS 493) not in Hoccleves hand reads Thus wrecchidly 10this gile woman did which although it works semantically is not only metrically defec-tive but also strangely retrospective at this point in the poem Whatever the correct read-ing Ido not think it is farfetched to assume that when Hoccleve perhaps unintentionallycopied man he was thinking of Jonathass guile in addition to Felliculas

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University

Pub

lishe

d by

Man

ey P

ublis

hing

(c)

WS

Man

ey amp

Son

Lim

ited

214 Hoccleve and the Apprehension of Money

As this reading of Jonathas and Fellicula suggests Hoccleve cannothelp writing about himself even when he is translating a tale fromthe Gesta romanorum and at the center of this compulsion is his ap-prehension of money In this essay I have argued that this appre-hension pervades the poetic forms and themes with which Hoccleveworks making them irreducibly expressive of the personal Yet atthe same time this apprehension is not merely personal not merelythe anxiety motivating repeated literary petitions but also expressesHoccleves crisis of meaning his grasp of the gulf between his worldand the principles and ideals which are supposed to govern it Com-pared with Lydgates poetry in which the personal is substantially (ifnot entirely) effaced and the traditional reproduced with only an oc-casional moment of poetic anxiety and with Chaucers in which thepersonal and traditional operate with few exceptions at several lev-els of indirection in Hoccleve s poetry the two are always both onthe surface and in tension with each other Deriving from the so-cioeconomic turbulence of his time and his own ambiguous positionwithin that turbulence manifesting itself through the bipolar idea ofmoney as unstable and absolute and spilling over from its sourcein to analogous representational systems such as language this ten-sion infects both the structure and themes of Hoccleve s poetryParadoxically behind Hoccleves autobiographical style lies his de-sire to escape that which is to a large degree responsible for it In thisessay I have attempted to trace the manner in which Hoccleve ren-ders this tension-a poetics in which a complex array of thematic el-ements work together in a manner finally both comprehensive andself-absorbed both wholly integrated in the name of an ideal andforever disintegrating in pursuit of it

Yale University