Abstract
The Boke of Noblesse, a Middle English prose treatise written by William Worcester, secretary to the famous veteran of the Hundred Years War, Sir John Fastolf, has long been recognised as an important source for scholars working on the political, military, and intellectual cultures of the fifteenth century. Worcester began writing the Boke of Noblesse in the early 1450s, in the immediate aftermath of the loss of the Lancastrian lands in France, and then revised and corrected it for presentation to Edward IV on the eve of the Picquigny campaign in 1475.1 Worcester’s main objective in this work is to argue in favour of a new campaign in France, a campaign to reclaim the lands that in his view naturally belong to English kings. But his remit is not as narrow as this might imply; his work touches on a range of other issues, from the best way of serving the common weal, for example, to recommendations about financial policy. The Boke of Noblesse is remarkable both for the breadth of reading it evidences — Worcester cites almost forty sources in the course of a relatively short text — and for its status as really the only text written in England in this period to directly analyse the causes of military defeat in France.
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Notes
For this account of the composition of the Boke of Noblesse, see K. B. McFarlane, ‘William Worcester: A Preliminary Survey’, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays, ed. G. L. Harriss (London: Hambledon, 1981), 199–224.
For humanism and classicism, see Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature 1430–1530 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 93–125; for masculinity, see Christopher Fletcher, ‘La force politique de la manhood: Le Boke of Noblesse de William Worcester’, in Les vecteurs de l’idéel: La légitimité implicite, ed. Jean-Philippe Genet (Rome: Publications of the École Française de Rome, forthcoming); for French texts and responses to defeat, see Catherine R. Nall, ‘William Worcester Reads Alain Chartier: Le Quadrilogue Invectif and its English Readers’, in Chartier in Europe, ed. E. J. Cayley and Ashby Kinch (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 134–48; and Reading and War in Fifteenth-Century England: From Lydgate to Malory (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), Chapter Two; C. T. Allmand and M. H. Keen, ‘History and the Literature of War: The Boke of Noblesse of William of Worcester’, in War, Government and Power in Late Medieval France, ed. C. T. Allmand (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 92–105; Christopher Allmand, ‘France-Angleterre à la Fin de la Guerre de Cent Ans: Le “Boke of Noblesse” de William Worcester’, in La ‘France Anglaise’ au Moyen Âge (Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1988), 103–11. In terms of attention to emotion in this text, Christopher Fletcher quite rightly points out that: ‘Dès le début du Boke of Noblese sa mission est autant émotionnelle que pratique’ (‘La force politique’).
Worcester here seems to be using ‘auctorite’ as an adjective. There are no attestations of the word used as adjective in the MED, but in his translation of Laurent de Premierfait’s translation of Cicero’s De senectute, Worcester refers to decisions ‘made by counseill by auctorite experience and by ordenauncys of grete witt and hygh discression’, where ‘auctorite’ similarly seems to function as an adjective (the source states ‘par counseil, par autorité et par ordonnance’): [William Worcester] (trans.), Tullius de Senectute (Westminster: Caxton, 1481, STC 5293), sig. C2 v; Stefania Marzano, ‘Édition critique du Livre de viellesse par Laurent de Premierfait (1405)’ (Master’s thesis, McGill University, 2003), 60. For Worcester’s use of the Livre de viellesse, see Wakelin, Humanism, 110.
London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 506, fol. 55r; Joseph Stevenson, ed. Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Wars of the English in France during the Reign of Henry VI, Roll Series 22, 2 vols. in 3 (London, 1861–4), II, 598. This title is written in the hand of the scribe who copies the French materials in this manuscript; it is not in Worcester’s hand. The collocation ‘dolorous lamentation’ appears in other petitionary contexts. The bill delivered to parliament in 1450 concerning the alleged offences of the duke of Suffolk specifies that the king’s ‘true feithfull subgettes and comons’ complain ‘with dolorous lamentation’: Anne Curry, ed. ‘Henry VI: Parliament of November 1449, Text and Translation’, in The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, ed. C. Given-Wilson et al., item 28. Internet version, at http://www.sd-editions.com/PROME, accessed on 06 October 2013 (Leicester: Scholarly Digital Editions, 2005). For the rhetorical conventions of petitions, see Gwilym Dodd, Justice and Grace: Private Petitioning and the English Parliament in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); for complaint literature, see Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 506, fol. 56v. The translation is taken from C. T. Allmand, ed. Society at War: The Experience of England and France during the Hundred Years War (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1973), 176.
It is possible that ‘dying of grief’ and similar phrases here function as euphemisms for suicide. Euphemism is commonly used to describe suicide in the Middle Ages; see Alexander Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages. Volume 1: The Violent against Themselves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 34–8.
BL, MS Royal 18.B.XXII, fol. 21r; Boke of Noblesse, 41. For the policy of giving lands and offices in conquered territory as rewards for military service, and the lack of compensation to those who then lost them as a result of the loss of Lancastrian lands in France, see C. T. Allmand, ‘La Normandie devant l’opinion anglaise à la fin de la guerre de Cent Ans’, Bibliothèque de l’école des Chartes, 128 (1970): 345–68, and Lancastrian Normandy, 1415–1450: The History of a Medieval Occupation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Alain Chartier, Le Quadrilogue Invectif, ed. Florence Bouchet (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011), 28, lines 21 to page 29, line 1, page 29, lines 15–18. This is powerfully rendered by a contemporary translator: ‘I live in deying, seing byfore [me] the deth of my wyfe and of my powr childern, which daily aschyn me sustenaunce, and liyth nat in my power to confort them, and I myself as a man lokeing hevyly and sorowfully for hungir and defaulte, abydyng my last day […] I am put in exile, prisoner in my howse, assailid of my frendis and of them that shold be my defendours, and I werre with souldiours wherof the payment is made with my propir goodis’: M. S. Blayney, ed. Fifteenth-Century English Translations of Alain Chartier’s Le Traité de l’Esperance and Le Quadrilogue Invectif, EETS os 270, 281, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974, 1980), I, 168, lines 11–15, 27–30.
London, College of Arms, MS 48, fols. 324v–325v. The document is undated, but Anne Curry plausibly suggests a date of 1452, as it refers to the loss of Guienne (the duchy was lost in 1451): Anne Curry, ‘Henry VI: Parliament of November 1450, Introduction’, in The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, ed. C. Given-Wilson et al. Internet version, at http://www.sd-editions.com/PROME, accessed on 6 October 2013 (Leicester: Scholarly Digital Editions, 2005).
For a discussion of the political purposes to which the cultivation of compassion could be put in the seventeenth century, see John Staines, ‘Compassion in the Public Sphere of Milton and King Charles’, in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 89–110.
For growing interest in the plight of non-combatants, particularly in the works of French writers, see C. T. Allmand, ‘War and the Non-Combatant’, in The Hundred Years War, ed. K. Fowler (London: Macmillan, 1971), 163–83; and ‘War and the Non-Combatant in the Middle Ages’, in Medieval Warfare: A History, ed. Maurice Keen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 253–72.
The line appears in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, line 1761, ‘Squire’s Tale’, line 479, ‘Merchant’s Tale’, line 1986, and Legend of Good Women, F Prologue, line 503. See also the ‘Man of Law’s Tale’, line 660: ‘As gentil herte is fulfild of pitee’. All references are to The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). For discussions of pity in relation to nobility in Chaucer’s work, see J. D. Burnley, Chaucer’s Language and the Philosophers’ Tradition (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1979), particularly Chapter 9; Jill Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 165–85; Felicity Riddy, ‘Engendering Pity in the Franklin’s Tale’, in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, ed. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London: Routledge, 1994), 54–71.
A similar set of associations — between pity and the responsibilities attached to kingship and conquest — seems to inform a moment in the second tale of Malory’s Morte Darthur. The ‘husbandeman’ (it is a Templar in Malory’s source) describes the cruelty inflicted by the giant on the local population, and tells Arthur ‘Now, as thou arte oure ryghtwos kynge, rewe on this lady and on thy lyege peple, and revenge us as a noble conquerroure sholde’: Sir Thomas Malory, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), I, 199. ‘as a noble conquerroure sholde’ is Malory’s addition to his source.
Reginald Pecock, The Folower to the Donet, ed. E. V. Hitchcock, EETS os 164 (London, 1924), 98, lines 24–30.
Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, ed. and trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1378a31–33, cited in Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1.
Courage is interesting in terms of the history of emotion. Following Aristotle’s discussion in the Nicomachian Ethics, it was typically treated as a virtue in the Middle Ages. Yet, crucially, courage does not exist as in some way free from emotion. Aristotle makes it clear that courage is not an absence of the emotion of fear, but the presence of the correct amount of it. To not feel fear at all would not make one courageous. I am most persuaded by the notion of courage as an ‘emotion-regulating virtue’ (on this, see Kristján Kristjánsson, Justice and Desert-Based Emotions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 22). The understanding of courage at work in the Boke of Noblesse clearly contains a significant emotional component, and follows in important respects the conception advanced in the Ethics, a text which Worcester knew (Worcester refers to ‘Aristotle in the Etiques’ in a letter of 1460, and there is a reference in one of his notebooks to ‘libro magno Ethicorum’: Richard Beadle, ‘Sir John Fastolf’s French Books’, in Medieval Texts in Context, ed. Denis Renevey and Graham D. Caie (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 96–112, at 107). In the Boke of Noblesse, courage can be produced through rational evaluation of a situation, the knowledge that you are better prepared, equipped or trained for war, as well as through tales or spectacles of the bravery of others.
For example, the chronicler John Hardyng describes how ‘Olde knyghtes actes with mynstrelles tonge stere/ The newe corage of yonge knightes to be moved’: John Hardyng, Chronicle, ed. H. Ellis (London: Rivington, 1812), 32. For wider discussion of the relationship between texts and courage, see Craig Taylor, Chivalry and the Ideals of Knighthood in France during the Hundred Years War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 152–5. This understanding also informs the way that Worcester describes other texts within his work. For example, the 12 labours of Hercules were written ‘to courage and comfort alle othre noble men of birthe to be victorious in entreprinses of armes’: BL, MS Royal 18.B.XXII, fol. 10v; Boke of Noblesse, 21.
The Prickinge of Love, for example, contains advice for the reader who has a heart that is ‘hard and dryye with-owten steryng of loue or of compassioun’ (cited in Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 127); a fifteenth-century sermon collection states that ‘prowde men arn […] harde in herte wyth-oute compassioun’: Jacob’s Well, ed. A. Brandeis, EETS os 115 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co, 1900; reprint 1973), 236, line 29.
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Nall, C. (2015). Moving to War: Rhetoric and Emotion in William Worcester’s Boke of Noblesse. In: Downes, S., Lynch, A., O’Loughlin, K. (eds) Emotions and War. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374073_7
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