London Lackpenny, The
DESCRIPTION: "To London once my steps I bend," and visited many people and watched many activities. But the Kentish plowman, come to seek justice, cannot enjoy the food or take part in many of the pleasures, because "for lack of money I might not speed."
AUTHOR: possibly John Lydgate (c. 1370?-C. 1451?)
EARLIEST DATE: 1877 (Bell)
KEYWORDS: travel hardtimes money MiddleEnglish
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (9 citations):
Bell-Combined-EarlyBallads-CustomsBalladsSongsPeasantryEngland, pp. 9-14, "London Lackpenny" (1 text)
Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #3759
DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #5987
ADDITIONAL: James M. Dean, _Medieval English Political Writings,_ TEAMS (Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1996, "In London There I Was Bent, or London Lickpenny" (1 text)
Rossell Hope Robbins, _Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Century_, Columbia University Press, 1959, #50, pp. 130-134, "London Lickpenny" (1 text)
W. W. Skeat, _Specimens of English LIterature from the Ploughmans Crede to the Shepheardes Calendar," Oxford, 1879, pp. 24-27
Celia and Kenneth Sisam, _The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse_, Oxford University Press, 1970; corrected edition 1973, #200, p. 446, "London Lickpenny" (1 text)
MANUSCRIPT: London, British Library, MS. Harley 367, folio 127 (folios disordered, so the poem ends on folio 126!)
MANUSCRIPT: London, British Library, MS. Harley 542, folio 102
NOTES [1494 words]: Friedman, p. 37, calls this the "best known of all pseudo-ballads" -- a term by which he means the transitional types of poems which led from French "ballades," which had a strict form rarely used in English, to the usual English four-line ballad stanzas.
Most older sources agree in attributing this piece (it is surely not a ballad) to John Lydgate, but Chambers, p. 117, considers this doubtful, and Pearsall, p. 218 (who calls it a "masterpiece of fifteenth century low satire") says that "we must admit that he did not" write it -- though he also says that Lydgate was capable of things (few others would agree). Robbins, p. 320, says bluntly, "The attribution to Lydfate, 'one of the freaks of literature,' rests on this MS. [Harley 367, which prefaces it, "A ballade compyled by Dan Iohn Lydgate, monke of Bury, about ... yeres agoo, and now newly ouersene and amended"]. The poem is not by Lydgate; and the rubric is of interest in showing how his name became attached to any medieval poem." Friedman, p. 38, cites others who reject Lydgate's authorship. Renoir never even mentions the poem.
Although John Lydgate was a very prolific writer, and one whose works survive in very many copies, our knowledge of him is relatively slight; most of what we know comes from the publication dates of his works. According to Kunitz/Haycraft, p. 328, his name comes from his birthplace of Lydgate in Suffolk.
According to NewCentury, p. 709, he was "one of the most prolific [poets] in the history of English letters. He was ordained as a priest in 1387, and gained a position as poet at the court of Henry IV, which he held during the reign of Henry V and after the accession of Henry VI." He is also supposed to have been patronized by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and to have known Chaucer. Benet, p. 660, says he also knew the Earl of Warwick, and was known for his allegorical forms.
Kunitz/Haycraft however give the date of his ordination as 1397.
Neither his birth date nor his death date is known; Renoir, p. 1, suggests 1370-1450. The last positive record of him is in 1446, when he was given a pension (Renoir, p. 145 n. 1).
Kunitz/Haycraft declare "Lydgate is at his best in his beast fables, his ballads, and in such brief humorous poems as London Lickpenny (not "Lackpenny" as sometimes given)." They snidely remark that he might have been a better poet if he had spent more time studying Chaucer and less time spitting out his own verses. They add that "his chief characteristic is dullness." Pearsall, p. 7, says that he is often charged with being prolix and dull, adding that "Prolixity is certainly a characteristic feature of Lydgate's style. No poet can mar time with such profuse demonstrations of energy, can so readily make twenty words do the work of one. Sometimes it is difficult to slow down the processes of mind to the breathless snail's pace of his verse." Even Joseph Ritson, that perpetual fan of the antique, labeled him a "voluminous, prosaick, and driveling monk" (Patterson, p. 4).
Bennett's tart comment on pp. 110-111 is that Lydgate "may well serve as a horrid example of the worst that [the contemporary society's system of supporting authors] could evolve." "He showed distinct powers of welding together words and phrases into collections which had all the appearance of verse, and he had an intolerable glibness and an indomitable energy, which enabled him to essay tasks which a more sensitive man, or one 'charged with children and chief lordes rent,' would not have dared to attempt." His total output is estimated at 145,000 lines of verse (Pearsall, p. 4, who calculates this as twice Shakespeare's output, and three times Chaucer's),
And he actually had the audacity to write a new Canterbury Tale, narrating it in his own voice; it was the first tale of the return from Canterbury (Lydgate/Edwards, p. 1)..This was The Siege of Thebes, and it clocks in at 4716 lines -- twice the line count of "The Knight's Tale," the longest of the genuine tales. Lydgate isn't the only author to create a bogus Canterbury Tale, but the others are generally attempts to fill in gaps in the incomplete Tales, and they are anonymous. Only Lydgate had the arrogance to think he could stand up to Chaucer. He was wrong. As NewCentury says, "Most of his longer works, like the Troy Book, are translations. Modern readers find them interminable and tedious, but many of his shorter poems may still be read with pleasure."
"Interminable" seems a suitable word. For example, the Troy Book is based on Guido della Colonna's Historia Destructionis Troiae. Lydgate's is one of three translations into Middle English, all roughly contemporary. The other two, according to Pearsall, pp. 126-127, are about 14,000 and 18,500 lines long. Lydgate managed to pad his version out to more than 30,000 lines. Even "London Lackpenny," though it has an interesting premise, continues it too long; there is a bit of Lydgate in that trait. Bell calls Lydgate "frequently difficult and tedious... [but] rarely obscure, and generally distinguished by ease and fluency." This is certainly true by comparison to his contemporaries; as Chambers notes on pp. 115-116, this was the period when many poets were taking Latin words and sticking an English ending on them and pretending they made sense.
As proof of Lydgate's prolixity, I offer the first sentence of the sequel to the Troy Book, The Siege of Thebes. The first sentence of this (as printed on pp. 29-30 of Lydgate/Edwards) is 65 lines long! It gets better after that -- the next one is only 26 lines long. Oy.
Or consider this comment by Pearsall, p. 58, "it is difficult to imagine an English sentence which contains neither subject nor predicate, but if there is one, it can probably be found at the opening of [Lydgate's] Guy of Warwick."
Nonetheless Lydgate was very popular. Bennett, p. 290, reports that we have 31 copies of Fall of Princes and 27 of The Siege of Thebes (Lydgate/Edwards lists 31 copies of the latter, but some are untraced or have only a few lines, so 27 is about right). That exceeds the number of copies of most of Chaucer's lesser works. At the beginning of the era of printing. Duff, pp. 71-77, counts twenty different editions of nine different Lydgate works published before 1500. Interestingly, it appears all of them spelled his name "Lidgate" (at this time, "i" and "y" were interchangeable).
All this leads McCarren/Moffat, p. 39, to ask, "Lydgate, for example, while not without his partisans among contemporary critics, has not achieved canonical status. But the numerous surviving copies of his work attest to his considerable medieval popularity. If we judge Lydgate to be an inferior poet, is the lack in his artistry or in our understanding?" This is a question which continues to bedevil those who compile Middle English anthologies: should they include Lydgate, because there is so much of his work, or should they omit it lest they turn off their students? As Renoir, p. 1, says, "He was one of the most prolific poets of all ages, and unquestionably the most important of his own time and country. During his mature lifetime and for more than three hundred years afterward, his countrymen ranked him on a level with the greatest poets; today, he is generalized as one of the dullest versifiers in the English language."
It's interesting that, although Lydgate wrote heavily on classical subjects, and was the leading translator of continental literature in this period (Renoir, p. vii), and had access to a great many classical volumes at Bury, his direct knowledge of classical authors seems to have been slight; Pearsall, pp. 35-37, believes he had actually read Ovid, but the other authors he knew mostly from collections of extracts (a common source of knowledge in the Middle Ages). Much of his knowledge of Troy, e.g., came from more modern rewrites, and he used French sources.
Still, Lydgate does deserve some credit for what he did for English verse. It had existed before him, of course, and Chaucer (to whom Lydgate owed a tremendous debt, most of his verse forms being Chaucerian; Pearsall, pp. 49, 51) had shown that English could be the language of great literature. Maybe Chaucer alone would have been enough to create an English literary tradition. But Lydgate, by writing in English, cemented Chaucer's triumph and made English literature a fixture (Pearsall, p. 50). He also helped establish quite a few words in English (Pearsall, p. 51).
Surprisingly for a poem attributed to Lydgate, the Index of Middle English Verse lists only two manuscript copies of this, both in the British Library, MS. Harley 367 (folios 126, 127) and Harley 542 (folio 102). Perhaps this is indirect evidence that it is not by Lydgate. On the other hand, both manuscripts contain other material attributed to Lydgate; Harley 367 has five other Lydgate pieces and the only other poem in Harley 542 is believed to be a Lydgate piece. - RBW
Bibliography- Benet: William Rose Benet, editor, The Reader's Encyclopdedia, first edition, 1948 (I use the four-volume Crowell edition but usually check it against the single volume fourth edition edited by Bruce Murphy and published 1996 by Harper-Collins)
- Bennett: H. S. Bennett, Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, being Volume II, Part I of the Oxford History of English Literature, Oxford, 1947; corrected reprint 1954
- Chambers: E. K. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1945, 1947
- Duff: E(dward) Gordon Duff, Fifteenth Century English Books: A Bibliography of Books and Documents Printed in England and of Books for the English Market Printed Abroad, Bbliographic Society/Oxford University Press, 1907 (I use the undated Nabu Public Domain reprint, a poor-quality scan of a library copy)
- Friedman: Albert B. Friedman, The Ballad Revival, University of Chicago Press, 1961
- Kunitz/Haycraft: Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, Editors, British Authors Before 1800: A Biographical Dictionary, H. W. Wilson, 1952 (I use the fourth printing of 1965)
- Lydgate/Edwards: Robert R. Edwards, editor, John Lydgate: The Siege of Thebes, TEAMS (Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2001
- McCarren/Moffat: Vincent McCarren & Douglas Moffat, editors, A Guide to Editing Middle English, University of Michigan Press, 1998
- NewCentury: Clarence L. Barnhart with William D. Haley, editors, The New Century Handbook of English Literature, revised edition, Meredith Publishing, 1967
- Patterson: Lee Paterson, editor, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales: A Casebook, Oxford University Press, 2007
- Pearsall: Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate, The University Press of Virginia Charlottesville, 1970
- Renoir: Alain Renoir, The Poetry of John Lydgate, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967
- Robbins: Rossell Hope Robbins, Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Century, Columbia University Press, 1959
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