History lessons from the end of time: Gower and the English Rising of 1381.(poet John Gower)(Critical Essay)

In June 1381, thousands of Englishmen suddenly went mad. Spontaneous insanity is one explanation that the contemporary poet John Gower offered for rebels' participation in the English Rising of 1381, which he described in lurid detail in the Vox clamantis. In June 1381, a chain of local upheavals raged throughout England. These upheavals included a week-long siege of London, where thousands of commoners from the city and from outlying areas joined forces. Non-ruling groups, from peasants through middle-rank guild members, stormed prisons, persecuted lawyers, razed John of Gaunt's palace, and beheaded such notables as the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chancellor of England. The spring and summer of 1381 witnessed the most geographically widespread series of rebellions in England during the Middle Ages, involving the largest number of insurgents in medieval English history, a number not equaled until the English civil war nearly three centuries later.

John Gower (c. 1330-1408), second only to Chaucer in the canon of great medieval English poets, has been dubbed "the poet of that Great Revolt." (1) Shortly after the rebellion, Gower dedicated the first book of the Vox clamantis, nearly twenty-two hundred lines of poetry, to describing the event. Not surprisingly, Gower--a wealthy landowner, a wool-trade investor, and possibly a lawyer (2)--depicted himself in the Vox being terrorized by rebels. Claiming to be a criminal who had committed no crime, Gower, the fictional narrator, hides in the forest for days, while insurgents, who have literally transformed into wild beasts, rule the streets of London and wreak havoc on the city and its inhabitants. Around 1390, the poet wrote the Confessio amantis, in which the memory of the English Rising of 1381 persists. In the Confessio's Prologue, at the beginning of his discussion of English commoners, Gower denounces popular insurrection as purposeless, random destruction (Prol., 499-584). (3)

A long tradition of scholarship investigates connections between Gower's poetry and the English Rising of 1381, not only in the Vox but also in the Confessio. (4) However, no one has yet explored the possibility that, although the Vox rails against the insurrection and although the Confessio's Prologue condemns popular uprisings, not all early Confessio readers necessarily opposed the English Rising of 1381. This oversight reflects Gower scholars' interest in the histories of privileged ranks. Medievalists have examined the Confessio at great length in relation to late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century readers from ruling groups, especially the aristocracy and royalty but also the gentry and the wealthiest mercantile ranks. When Gower scholars have discussed the English Rising of 1381, they have therefore considered audiences that were believed to have opposed the rebellion. This article is the first study of the Confessio's address to readers who had participated in or who had sympathized with the English Rising of 1381.

Because substantial numbers of rebels emerged from these ranks in 1381, (5) the upper strata of non-ruling urban groups (which will be defined in a moment) provide the focus of this piece. Using a methodology in dialogue with the work of Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall, (6) this article investigates how the Confessio addressed early readers from the upper strata of urban non-ruling groups in the wake of the English Rising of 1381. More precisely, I explore the ideological recruitment at work in the Confessio's rendition of Nebuchadnezzar's dream. I examine the Prologue's version of Nebuchadnezzar's dream as a record of some of the ways in which ideologies supporting the ruling groups sought both to recruit former rebels (and their sympathizers) into identifications with ruling groups and to fracture identifications with lesser ranks in the wake of the English Rising of 1381.

I focus on Nebuchadnezzar's dream in the Prologue because this divine vision contains one of the Confessio's most pointed discussions of history as a process. Also, Nebuchadnezzar's dream holds a prominent place in the poem, for this vision and its exegesis occupy nearly half the Prologue. (Not surprisingly, the tiered statue is the most common illustration in Confessio manuscripts. (7)) This article investigates how, through the teleological history structuring Nebuchadnezzar's vision, the Confessio offered to alter the ways in which audience members understood how history happens and experienced their own relation to the past and the future. In doing so, the poem proposed to change how readers conceptualized their agency, their interests, their enemies, and their allies. Ultimately, through Nebuchadnezzar's dream, the text worked to transform how early readers from the upper strata of non-ruling urban groups understood their relation to the English Rising of 1381 and to insurrection in general.