Defamation as political contest during the reign of Richard II

Medium Aevum

Volumn 72, Issue 2, 2003, Pages

  Hanrahan, Michael ^a  

^a BATES COLLEGE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950353116     PISSN: 00258385     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/43630497     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. A. K. R. Kiralfy, Potter's Historical Introduction to English Law and its Institutions, 4th edn (London, 1958), p. 431
2. William Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 5 th edn, vol. III (London, 1942), p. 409
3. and T. F. T. Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law, 5 th edn (Boston, 1956), p. 486
4. Edwin D. Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 122-56, in turn, considers transgressive speech and social control and includes a discussion of slander, which focuses on the vice of detraction
5. Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, Pa, 1996), pp. 32-4, has paused to consider defamation as a mechanism of censorship. Her understanding of defamation as prohibitive of speech ultimately conceives of it as repressive rather than productive of meaning
6. For discussions of Gaunt's activities and resultant unpopularity, see Ferster, Fictions of Advice, p. 32
7. Pamela Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers' Company and the Politics and Trade of London, 1000-1485 (New Haven, Conn., 1995), pp. 252f
8. George Holmes, The Good Parliament (Oxford, 1975), pp. 189f
9. and Plucknett, A Concise History, p. 486
10. Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community, p. 252
11. The Anonimalle Chronicle, ed. V. H. Galbrath (Manchester, 1970), pp. 104f
12. See Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, Calif., 1994), pp. 28-30, 37f., 77-80, for a discussion of broadsides
13. Kiralfy, Potter's Historical Introduction, p. 431
14. R. H. Helmholz, 'Crime, compurgation and the courts of the medieval church', in Canon Law and the Law of England (London, 1987), p. 126, also notes that 'Medieval common law conceded jurisdiction to the Church over all defamation.'
15. Lindahl, Earnest Games, p. 74, makes this point and understands the statute as having been 'designed to punish those whose words were perceived as threats to national security'
16. Ruth Bird's influential study, The Turbulent London of Richard II (London, 1949), understands London civic politics as having been organized into these opposing parties. Some historians have recently revised her view. Pamela Nightingale, 'Capitalists, crafts and constitutional change in late fourteenth-century London', Past and Present, 124 (1989), 3-35
17. Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community, p. 27;, citing Edgar Powell and G. M. Trevelyan, The Peasants' Rising and the Lollards: Documents (London, 1899), p. 29
18. See also Sylvia Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1948), p. 79
19. and Hanawalt, 'Of Good and Ill Repute', p. 20
20. Rigby, English Society, p. 175
21. and Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, vol. II, ed. H. T. Riley (London, 1863), p. 66
22. Memorials, p. 460
23. Hanawalt, 'Of Good and Ill Repute',p. 23
24. Westminster Chronicle, pp. 94f
25. Rotuli Parliamentorum, vol. III (London, 1783), p. 234
26. Select Cases on Defamation to 1600, ed. Richard H. Helmholz (London, 1985), p. 14
27. Select Cases, p. xxxi
28. See Michael Hanrahan, 'The seduction of The Testament of Love', Literature and History, 3rd ser. 7 (1998), 1-15
29. All citations to Usk's Testament are from The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. VII (Oxford, 1897), pp. 1-145. Book number indicated in small-capital roman numerals, chapter by lower-case roman numerals, and line number by arabic numerals
30. Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia, Pa, 1999), esp. pp. 1-10, describes the dense and shifting meanings of 'truth' in late-fourteenth-century England
31. Helmholz, 'Crime, compurgation and the courts', pp. 131-5 (p. 152)
32. See also Wunderli, London Church Courts, p. 64
33. Helmholz, 'Crime, compurgation and the courts', p. 131
34. Westminster Chronicle, pp. 215-17. Hector and Harvey (p. 216f. n. 1) note that the chronicler has conflated this proclamation with another issued in London at the time, 'addressed generally, announcing the grant of royal protection to the Appellants and the accused until parliament should meet'
35. William Illingworth, 'Copy of a libel against Archbishop Neville, etc.', Archaeologia, 16 (1812), 80-3 (p. 82)
36. Calendar of Letter Book H, p. 314
37. Memorials, p. 500 n. 1
38. See the Rotuli Parliamentorum, III, 235, or Westminster Chronicle, p. 267, for the charge of treason against Brembre
39. Chaucerian Polity (Stanford, Calif., 1997), p. 180
40. Memorials, p. 526
41. Chaucerian Polity, p. 181
42. Paul Strohm, Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, 1992), pp. 107f
43. and Sylvia Federico, 'A fourteenth-century erotics of politics: London as a feminine New Troy', Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 19 (1997), 121-55 (pp. 145f.), discuss this erotically laden metaphor
44. Subject of History (Madison, Wis., 1991), pp. 244-79 (PP-244-50)
45. For a discussion of slander's disruptive powers as self-perpetuating in the Cook's Tale, see Michael Hanrahan, 'Chaucer's London', in A Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown (London, 2000), pp. 266-80 (pp. 273-6)