The Clash of Divergent Political Strategies, Moral Categories and Literary Conventions in the Early Fifteenth Century Poetry: Mum and the Sothsegger as a Reflection of the Tensions Within the Crisis-Ridden Late Medieval Society

Abstract

The long-lasting implications of a series of natural calamities, social upheavals, and political turnovers, which occurred in the fourteenth century, were still acutely felt at the beginning of the following century. An early fifteenth-century poem, Mum and the Sothsegger, reflects the social tensions and conflicting discourses on poverty, which operated in the late medieval crisis-ridden society. The poem presents the critique of both the abuse of the poor and the deceitful discourse of those in power as the elements of the instruction on statecraft. The appeal to the ruling class to redress the grievances of the impoverished is accompanied in Mum and the Sothsegger by the representation of the oppressed as potential rebels, whose resentment may pose a dangerous threat to public order, and whose actions, therefore, need to be restrained, so that they would not disrupt the traditional hierarchy of the tripartite society. The ambiguity characterizing in the poem both the depiction of the destitute and the narrator’s arguments supporting the alleviation of their suffering might be interpreted as a reflection of the high level of social anxiety generated by the series of crises that occurred in the fourteenth century.