A Burnable Book: A Novel Part 38

'My lord?'

'The battle at Najera, with Prince Edward and Lancaster, all those years ago.'

'You were in Edward's household,' I recalled, prompting a nod. 'During the Castile campaign for Pedro.'

'I wouldn't have been with them at that woman's castle. I was with the Gascon encampment at Burgos during those weeks. But I remember Edward's illness after the battle, the fevers and the raging, this sense that the man was ... detaching from himself, that his mind had bent somehow. Everyone agreed afterwards that Spain was the sad beginning of a long end for the prince. Seguina's mother wasn't the first woman he brutalized in those years, nor the last.'

We stood for a while longer, listening to the hurried murmurs of a priest from one of the chantries before the south porch. I think we both sensed a circle closing, though the machinations that had brought us here were clearly the beginning of something much larger. I thought of Hawkwood, spinning his sticky webs in Tuscany. Of Simon, fled for who knew where. Of Sarah, who had died knowing nothing of her son's chosen profession; a minor blessing.

'So what next?' I eventually asked him. 'Will you return the favour, have Hawkwood snipped?'

The chancellor let out a sigh, a slow wind of realism. 'We need Hawkwood, Gower, even more than Hawkwood needs England. I see a long war ahead of us. There's no reason to go stirring the pot over an unfortunate incident easily gotten past. This is how it works in the end. We pardon our second-worst enemies, make treaties with our former slaughterers. Overlook treason to win a battle.'

I told him I understood. He would get no objections from John Gower for choosing political expediency over moral purity. 'And Simon?' I asked neutrally. 'Will you pursue him further?'

'I will leave that in your hands.' He gave me a baronial look. 'The realm owes you a great debt, Gower. G.o.d knows your talents can create some peculiar twists. In this case, though, they've won the day.'

There was a rather uncomfortable pause. I knew what the chancellor expected me to say. He stood there, waiting for my demands. The Exchequer's books, a bishop's house on the Strand. Even a knighting by the king was not out of the question.

I surprised myself by not asking for a single shilling.

The next morning, after one of the soundest sleeps of my life, I left the priory grounds on foot, crossing the bridge and walking beneath the outer arches of the St Thomas Chapel as the first glimmer of sun broke through low morning clouds. Once on the north bank I descended to the wharf.a.ge and the offices of the wool custom. Chaucer, so a clerk at the customhouse told me, was out of town. A difficulty at Hythe, rumours of illegal wool.

The clerk stepped out for a moment, giving me the opportunity to take a glimpse at Chaucer's desk. On it sat a small quire, weighted open to a page nearly empty of content: pen trials, a few doodles, some couplets. I leaned over and read.

Befell that in that season, on a day, In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay Ready to ride forth on my pilgrimage To Canterbury with full devout courage, At night was come into that hostelry Well nine and twenty in a company Of sundry folk, by adventure fallen In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all, That toward Canterbury would ride.

I had to read the lines again. In Southwark? Chaucer was a London man, through and through, and as far as I knew had never gone on pilgrimage to Becket's shrine, or anywhere else, for that matter. If he travelled to Canterbury it would be for business or pleasure, not for faith. False prophecies, false pilgrimages: all the same to my slippery friend.

Outside the customhouse I stood on the wharf.a.ge, watching the slow, careful movement of the Goose as it craned a pile of wool from the dock. On the decks of the trading vessels workers toiled at the crates and barrels of goods brought to London from around the earth, from the looms of Lyon, the vineyards of Alsace and Tuscany, the olive groves of al-Andalus, and there, on the river's edge of London, with the low bulk of Southwark rising before me, with the dense span of the bridge against the sky, I felt the unboundedness of it all. A history I would never fully understand had pa.s.sed me by, these great machinations linking Florence, London, the marches of Aragon and Castile and the narrow lanes of Southwark, and a dead woman on the moor.

We live in an immense world, whole universes of taste and touch and scent, of voices commingling in the light, and dying away with the common dread that stands at every man's door. Yet we perceive and remember this world only as it creates those single fragments of experience: moments of everyday kindness, or self-sacrificing love, or unthinkable brutality. I angled my face to the sun and blinked away a spot, then another, these dark blemishes floating in my sight, mottling my vision, more of them by the day. Yet behind and beyond them I could imagine, for a moment, the holy sheen of Sarah's skin, the faces of our children, the intricate gloss of some forgotten book, and I thought how simple it should be, to know and cherish the proper objects of our lives.

On the near end of the bridge I bought a bird pie. The pigeon was bad, I realized after the first bite though thankfully before swallowing. I spat it out. I thought about returning to the pieman's booth though I would have to push back through the crowd, which had thickened with the unwelcome intrusion of aristocracy. A lower knight, mounted and shouting for s.p.a.ce, pa.s.sing over from the bankside. Then the catcalls, some trash dropped from the houses above, a few small missiles thrown, all done with that urban mix of defiance and cheer, the common resonance of this angry city I bafflingly loved.

It came to me then, the source of Chaucer's folly. A hostelry at night, a diverse company of pilgrims, a tale of fellowship and adventure, all beginning at the Tabard, of all places. A book for England's sake: stories within stories, and the stuff of life, encompa.s.sed by the one great story we all must share yet none of us will ever get to read. At the foot of the bridge I stumbled on a loose paver but recovered my footing as a flock of starlings whorled above, as the way widened into the teeming breadth of Southwark, like a narrow river finding the sea.

A Note to the Reader.

One of the strange pleasures of writing A Burnable Book has been the discovery and partial correction of my own ignorance about much of medieval life. After half a career spent studying and teaching the literature of the Middle Ages, it came as a rude awakening to realize I couldn't answer a simple question posed by my younger son: 'Did they have forks?' (Yes, Malcolm, after a fashion, though not many of them, and mostly for serving, not eating.) Though I have drawn on many of the same sorts of sources I regularly consult in my academic work, fiction requires a more eclectic approach to research guided by the idiosyncrasies of story and character. As often as I have read around in the latest scholarship on aristocratic politics during the reign of Richard II, I have found myself consulting the work of nineteenth-century antiquarians on gutters and drainage in the Southwark stews.

I hope this note will guide readers in following up on any aspects of the historical setting that interest them, as well as help answer questions about the specific choices I have made in depicting a medieval world so familiar yet so foreign to our own. Readers will find occasional posts about setting and sources on my blog, www.burnablebooks.com, and I am happy to receive queries and corrections as they arise.

John Gower's London was three cities, not one, and much of its life and culture was shaped by the distinctive character of the two smaller suburbs lying outside the walled city itself (and beyond its jurisdiction). The history of London, Southwark, and Westminster in the decades following the Black Death has been the subject of considerable scholarship in recent years that has helped me flesh out the bones of a story set in a richly complex milieu. The works of urban history I have consulted most frequently include Caroline Barron's London in the Later Middle Ages, a magisterial study of the medieval city, its inst.i.tutions, and its diverse population; Sheila Lindenbaum's numerous articles on everything from urban festivals to aristocratic tournaments; Robert Shepherd's Westminster: A Biography, with its rich appreciation for the historical contours and character of the royal city; Martha Carlin's Medieval Southwark, a thorough guide to the intricacies of life and politics in the small suburb across the bridge, where bishops and butchers, tanners and taverners lived side by side and elbowed for room; Barbara Hanawalt's Growing Up in Medieval London, with its inspiring recreations of individual lives of the young; the myth-busting scholarship of Judith Bennett, Marjorie McIntosh, Cordelia Beattie, Kim Phillips, and others on the lives, careers, and literacies of medieval singlewomen; the work of urban archaeologists on Winchester Palace, the customhouse near Billingsgate, and other medieval sites; and Frank Rexroth's Deviance and Power in Late Medieval London, a field guide of sorts to the underworld of urban grime and petty crime that surrounded Gower, Chaucer, and the other city-dwellers populating this story. I have also benefited from new work by Linne Mooney and Estelle Stubbs on the scribal culture of the London Guildhall, home to an urban bureaucracy that included the likes of Ralph Strode and Adam Pinkhurst the latter, perhaps, Geoffrey Chaucer's most notable scribe. (The map included at the beginning of the book is based in part on the map of late-medieval London included in Mooney and Stubbs' Scribes and the City, enhanced by the renderings in Carlin's Medieval Southwark and the wonderfully detailed maps created for the third volume of the British Atlas of Historic Towns.) Other bureaucracies are also part of the story told in A Burnable Book, particularly the legal profession emerging during these years and the peculiar educational system that trained its members. The origins of the Inns of Court in the final decades of the fourteenth century are shrouded in obscurity. While the Inner and Middle Temples were organized well before 1385, the earliest written records from any of the four inns come from the 1420s; the exact nature of legal education and barrister culture in the fourteenth century is thus a matter of pure speculation (hence the raucous spectacle performed by the apprentices at Temple Hall, invented for this book). We do know something about the various personnel who defined the changing profession. The character of Thomas Pinchbeak, serjeant-at-law, is based on a real member of the Order of the Coif. The history of the order has been treated in great depth by J.H. Baker, whose many works have helped define the study of medieval English law and its inst.i.tutions.

As one of my early readers helped me see, A Burnable Book is in part a story of towncrown conflict, with the novel's largely London-based narrative playing out against the political crisis that more broadly defined this period of English history. The year 1385 was a pivotal one for the nation's aristocratic cla.s.ses, with the expiration in May of a truce with France, Scottish incursions along the northern border, and rising tensions between the uppermost factions in the realm. Just months after the events portrayed here, King Richard would create a number of new dukedoms and earldoms: John of Gaunt's brothers would become dukes, Michael de la Pole the Earl of Suffolk, and Robert de Vere the Duke of Ireland. While the machinations of magnates are only a small part of this story, they are an important backdrop to the intrigue surrounding the book sought by Gower and others, and a domestic counterpart to equally pressing international affairs. Here I am indebted to studies of Richard II's reign by Nigel Saul, Chris Given-Wilson, Michael Bennett, and Anthony Goodman; to Jonathan Sumption's stirring history of the Hundred Years War, particularly his comments on the importance of spies; to biographies of the mercenary Sir John Hawkwood by William Caferro and Stephen Cooper; to Paul Strohm's many studies of literary culture and court politics; to books by W.H. Ormrod and Stephanie Trigg on the Order of the Garter; and to Alison Weir's Mistress of the Monarchy, a luminous re-evaluation of Katherine Swynford. The genealogical tables at the front are intended to bring out the close relationships between the upper English aristocracy and its foreign counterparts, including the crown of Castile and the Visconti of Milan.

The character of Eleanor/Edgar Rykener was inspired by an extraordinary doc.u.ment discovered by Sheila Lindenbaum in the Corporation of London Records Office. The doc.u.ment, subsequently transcribed and translated by David Lorenzo Boyd and Ruth Mazo Karras, was published in the first volume of the Gay and Lesbian Quarterly as 'The Interrogation of a Male Transvest.i.te Prost.i.tute in Fourteenth-Century London'. The work of Ruth Karras on medieval prost.i.tution and the lives of those who practised it has been immensely helpful to me in imagining the denizens and cultures of Gropec.u.n.t Lane and Rose Alley, as has Carolyn Dinshaw's scholarship on medieval s.e.xualities and gender.

Though the labours of modern scholars are an invaluable resource to any writer of historical fiction, they are no subst.i.tute for the primary sources in which medieval people speak to us in something like their own voices. I have consulted a wealth of sources attesting to the lives of the women and men of this era, always with an eye for unusual details. Coroners' rolls and bishops' registers, law cases and legal moots, memorandum books and conduct manuals: in these doc.u.ments can be found the makings of countless medieval life stories whose contours appear only dimly to our modern eyes. Sources such as parish registers and household accounts have furnished given names and surnames (some of which I have altered for literary effect), while probate inventories, wills, and household account books show us glimpses of the objects, commodities, and habits that shaped the material world of late-medieval England. Readers wanting a taste of medieval London's doc.u.mentary record for themselves might enjoy paging through the hundreds of examples collected and translated in Henry Thomas Riley's Memorials of London and London Life in the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Centuries or the Liber Albus, an immense compilation of rules and customs relating to city governance compiled in the early fifteenth century (both are freely available online). For a general guide to daily life and customs in the period, readers can do no better than Ian Mortimer's Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England.

I have also consulted the writings of monastic and lay chroniclers of these fascinating years. The Westminster Chronicle details the tensions between John of Gaunt and King Richard over the first half of 1385, as well as contemporaneous events in Italy surrounding the Visconti and Sir John Hawkwood. The metrical chronicle of the Chandos Herald recounts the 1367 campaign of Edward the Black Prince in Castile and Aragon in the months surrounding the Battle of Najera, providing the tragic background to the story of Seguina d'Orange.

The literature of medieval England, my own scholarly specialty, has been a constant source of reference, dialogue, and slang; readers familiar with the writings of Chaucer, Gower, William Langland, and others will find allusions and borrowings on nearly every page. The prophecies of the De Mortibus Regum Anglorum are modelled on the alliterative long lines of Langland and the Pearl poet. In addition to literary texts, innumerable historical and doc.u.mentary sources are excerpted in the Middle English Dictionary and its compendium. As I always advise my students, the MED is far superior to the OED for anyone interested in early English wordings, first usages, and forms of address. (As the MED demonstrates, for example, words and phrases such as 'my lord' and 'sire' were ubiquitous in the period and used even within the household, despite the common a.s.sumption that they were reserved for aristocrats and kings.) Finally, John Gower. Despite his prolific career, his adept use of three distinctive literary languages, and his featured role in Shakespeare's Pericles, Gower has always suffered by comparison to his more ill.u.s.trious contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer. Yet the two poets were close and perhaps life-long friends. We know about this friendship from several doc.u.mentary sources, including one granting Gower power of attorney for the duration of Chaucer's 1378 trip to Italy (the later trip imagined here is my own invention). There are also several moments in which the two poets speak to one another within the lines of their verse. One of these, an apostrophe addressed by Chaucer to 'Moral Gower' near the end of Troilus and Criseyde, has largely shaped the critical perception of Gower's character.

The protagonist of A Burnable Book is a more ... let's say compromised Gower. In exploring the darker sides of his character, his family, and his friendships, I have been guided above all by the poet's own writing: by the bleak, even nihilistic tone one often finds him adopting toward the many subjects he treats. For particular details of Gower's life and circ.u.mstances (including the encounter along the Thames with King Richard, based on the highly stylized account in the Confessio Amantis), I have relied on the scholarship of Robert F. Yeager, Derek Pearsall, Candace Barrington, John M. Bowers, Andrew Galloway, Jonathan Hsy, and Diane Watt, whose work sparked some of my initial thinking about the poet's shadier side. If the John Gower imagined here strikes specialists as untenable or overdone, I hope they will attribute this in part to the poet's own sense of our collective estrangement from the ever-changing world around us. As Gower puts it near the end of his greatest work, 'I know not how the world is went.'

Acknowledgments.

G.K. Chesteron once called Geoffrey Chaucer a 'poet of grat.i.tude,' a writer 'positively full of warm acknowledgment'. Of all the poet's qualities, this is perhaps the easiest to imitate. Over the years I have acc.u.mulated many debts to friends, colleagues, and correspondents who have leant support of various kinds, from careful readings to open ears and ready pints. They include Linda Blackford, Carol Blount, Heather Blurton, Andrew Cole, Edward Dusinberre, Mark Edmundson, Katherine Eggert, Dyan Elliott, David Gies, Jennifer Hershey, Jen Jahner, William Kuskin, Jana Mathews, Deborah McGrady, Christian McMillen, Howard Morhaim, John Parker, John Pepper, Caroline Preston, Patrick Pritchett, Myra Seaman, Lisa Russ Spaar, Emily Steiner, Beth Sutherland, John Stevenson, Michael Suarez, Christopher Tilghman, Cynthia Wall, and Mark Winokur. Paul Fox, chairman of the Heraldry Society, advised me on some of the finer points of royal heraldry in the Edwardian and Ricardian age. Amy Appleford shared her knowledge of burial practices for the poor of London. Paul Strohm, formerly the J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of Medieval Studies at Oxford and an endless reserve of knowledge about medieval London and its culture, read the ma.n.u.script in an early draft and made numerous suggestions about setting, chronology, and historical detail. Andrew Galloway and Claire Waters read the book meticulously and with careful attention to details of idiom and language.

As a teacher of medieval culture I am also indebted to the scholars whose formative teaching exposed me to the wonders of the medieval world-its history, its books, its literature, its music, its theology, and its art. Thanks to Teodolinda Barolini, Christopher Baswell, Marvin Becker, Caroline Walker Bynum, Rita Copeland, Consuelo Dutschke, Joan Ferrante, Carmela Franklin, Barbara Hanawalt, Robert Hanning, Ron Martinez, Linda Neagley, Susan Noakes, and David Wallace.

The editorial teams at HarperCollins (UK) and William Morrow (US) have shepherded this book through the complex and exciting process from contract to publication. I am deeply indebted to Julia Wisdom and Rachel Kahan, who acquired A Burnable Book and saw it through revisions and production, for their wisdom, support, and patience. Thanks also go to Emad Akhtar, Ben Bruton, Trish Daly, Jaime Frost, Tavia Kowalchuk, Ashley Marudas, Rachel Meyers, Anne O'Brien, Aja Pollock, and Kate Stephenson.

My marvelous agent, Helen h.e.l.ler, plucked a ma.n.u.script out of her slush pile and took a chance on an unproven writer of turgid academic prose. She read multiple drafts of this book with her unique blend of patience and severity. Her support, dedication, and pep talks have meant the world to me (as have her unflinching critiques).

My parents, Sheila and Harry Holsinger, deserve endless grat.i.tude for the selfless support they have given me over a lifetime; as do Carol Holsinger, Eric Holsinger, and Anna Jullien, my siblings, for their constancy and love; Betsy and Bob Brickhouse, my in-laws, for their warm friendship and encouragement; Campbell and Malcolm, my sons, for all the joy, energy, and soccer; and Anna Brickhouse, for love, brilliance-everything.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

Bruce Holsinger is a professor of English language and literature whose books on medieval culture have won major prizes from the Modern Language a.s.sociation and Medieval Academy of America.

He is also a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Council of Learned Societies.

He lives in Virginia with his wife and two sons. A Burnable Book is his first novel.

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