Abstract
The scribe John Shirley introduces The Legend of St. George with a fascinating headnote, one that offers evidence of John Lydgate’s involvement in a multimedia mode of poetic production and details the commission and early reception of his verse. The note, found in Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.20, reads:
Next nowe filowing here bygynneQe Qe devyse of a steyned halle of Qe lyf of Saint George ymagyned by Daun Johan Qe Munk of Bury Lydegate / and made with Qe balades at Qe request / of Qarmorieres of London for Qonour of Qeyre broQerhoode and Qeyre feest of Saint George.1
Any clear insight this seemingly straightforward note could provide has been muddied by persistent scholarly misreadings. Readers from the sixteenthcentury antiquarian John Stow to contemporary critic Derek Pearsall have misunderstood the nature of the “steyned halle.” Most recently, in an accidental and yet richly telling error, literary scholar James Simpson substitutes the London Goldsmiths for “Qarmorieres of London” as patrons of the poem.2
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Notes
Transcribed in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, 2 vols., ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS e.s. 107 and o.s. 192 (London: Oxford University Press, 1911, 1934), I:145.
James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 58. I discuss and cite specific examples of discussions of the medium of the “steyned halle” below.
George Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London (1908; repr. London: Frank Cass, 1963), p. 179. My conversion is approximate; translating tapestry dimensions to modern units can be tricky. See Susan Groag Bell, The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 66, 112, 165–69.
Charles M. Clode, The Early History of the Guild of Merchant Taylors (London: Harrison & Sons, 1888), p. 78.
London, Guildhall Library MS 35044, quoted in Timothy Morley, Some Account of the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers (London: Guildhall Library, 1878), p. 63.
Gothic: Art for England 1400–1547, ed. Richard Marks and Paul Williamson (London: V&A Publications, 2003), pp. 198–99.
Anne Marshall of the Open University maintains a frequently updated web catalogue of parish church wall paintings, including those at Banningham. See Anne Marshall, Medieval Wall Painting in the Parish Church: A Developing Catalogue, “St. George and the Dragon: Banningham, Norfolk,” http:// www.paintedchurch.org/bannigeo.htm accessed May 2, 2006. Marshall points out that armor styles reflect current trends in other parish church paintings of George: the fourteenth-century George at Little Kimble in Buckinghamshire sports fourteenth-century chain mail while the fifteenth-century George at Hornton in Oxfordshire wears the full plate that became popular in this later period. For images of Hornton, see http://www. paintedchurch.org/horntgeo.htm; for Little Kimble, see http://www. paintedchurch.org/lkimgeo.htm accessed May 15, 2006.
Letter Book G, fol. 290. All citations of Letter Books are from Calendar of Letter Books of the City of London, A–L, 11 vols., ed. Reginald R. Sharpe (London: J.E. Francis, 1899–1912), online at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/accessed February 28, 2006.
Memorials of London and London Life in the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Centuries, ed. and trans. Henry Thomas Riley (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1868), p. 145.
See Syndey Hewitt Pitt, Some Notes on the History of the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers (London: private printing, 1930), pp. 8, 13.
Edward Basil Jupp, An Historical Account of the Worshipful Company of Carpenters (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1887), pp. 242–43.
Joseph Aubrey Rees, The Worshipful Company of Grocers (London and Sydney: Chapman and Dodd, 1923), p. 42.
Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), p. 77.
John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales: Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, 8 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), 1:64–70.
David Lorenzo Boyd, “Social Texts, Bodley 686, and The Politics of the Cook’s Tale,” in Reading from the Margins, ed. Seth Lerer (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1996), p. 85 n10 [81–97].
Thomas Brewer suggests Carpenter commissioned the paintings in 1430, when he applied for a charter to found a chantry in the north aisle of St. Paul’s. See Thomas Brewer, Memoir of the Life and Times of John Carpenter (London: A. Taylor, 1856), p. 29. However, Carpenter could easily have commissioned the paintings in the cloister independent of this foundation. The north side of Old St. Paul’s was popular with London civic groups; the Armourers’ Guild and the Goldsmiths’ Guild both had chantries there. It was a natural location for the town clerk to commission a work at any point in his career. A close examination of all manuscripts naming the verses as the “Dance of Paul’s” would surely help narrow the date of commission, but as far as I know no such approach has yet been taken.
Andrew R. Walkling, “The Problem of ‘Rondolesette Halle’ in the Awntyrs off Arthure,” Studies in Philology 100.2 (2003): 113–14 [105–122].
For examples of this use of “chamber,” see MED, s.v. “chaumbre,” n. 10g. Textile “beds” are mentioned in numerous Middle English inventories and court cases. The London plea and memoranda rolls, for instance, include late fourteenth-century references to a “steyned bed” (Roll A 21, Membr. 12); beds of “worsteyd,” a woolen cloth (Roll A 33, Membr. 8); an embroidered bed depicting leopard’s heads (Roll A 11, Membr. 6); and a bed of “tapicerie” featuring a lion (Roll A 32, Membr. 4). All citations of the plea and memoranda rolls are from Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls of the City of London, 6 vols., ed. A.H. Thomas and Philip E. Jones (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1926–61), online at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/accessed March 10, 2006.
John Stow, A Suruay of London (1598; repr. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service, 2001), p. 288. http://name.umdl.umich.edu/a13049.0001.001 accessed March 15, 2006.
As in the 1562 quote given to support the definition “Coloured with liquid pigments that penetrate below the surface.” See “stained,” ppl. a.3, The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
In 1400, the Steynours applied “for certain ordinances to be approved and enrolled.” Letter Book H, fol. 331. W.A.D. Engleworth, in his history of the Painter-Stainers Company, suggests that “If ‘staining’ did not consist of the colouring of cloth or canvas as distinct from wood, it is difficult to see what else could have been the art referred to.” He concludes this in part from the ordinances of 1400, which repeatedly mention cloth and require members of the craft to use only new cloth and fine pigments. W.A.D. Engleworth, The History of the Painter-Stainers Company of London (London: Hazell, Watson & Viney, 1950), pp. 46–47.
Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. Ann E. Keep (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961), p. 157; Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 181.
Claire Sponsler, “Text and Textile: Lydgate’s Tapestry Poems,” in Medieval Fabrications, ed. Jane Burns (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 25–26; she cites Stow’s note on p. 28.
See Hammond’s seminal article on Lydgate’s verse and narrative visual schemes: Eleanor Hammond, “Two Tapestry Poems by Lydgate,” Englische Studien 43 (1910–11): 21–22 [10–26].
Lydgate, The Minor Poems, I:433. Sponsler proposes that Bycorne may have been delivered orally rather than included on the cloth, pointing to the R.3.20 running titles for the poem, which mention mummings (a kind of performance), to support this idea. Sponsler, “Text,” p. 28. For an argument that these compare Bycorne to a mumming without defining it as such, see Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 106 n2.
A description and analysis of the entire sequence can be found in Adolpho Salvatore Cavallo, Medieval Tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1983), pp. 347–58; the piece containing an image of the poet is reproduced on p. 354. Although Cavallo titles the piece The Poet with his Epilogue, he notes that this panel has been exhibited and published as the first panel, as well, and suggests it could have been either prologue or epilogue (p. 350).
As far as I am aware, Lydgate has never been identified as the source of Caxton’s passage. Manfred Görlach believes it to be Caxton’s own addition, but he also notes that “[o]ne of the evident shortcomings of the investigations [of hagiographical traditions] available in print is that scholars have tended to start with Caxton and look backwards to his sources.” See Manfred Görlach, Studies in Middle English Saints’ Legends (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1998), pp. 73, 141. While I have not been able to determine with certainty that Caxton had access to any of the extant manuscripts of St. George, there are tantalizing possibilities: the mercer Roger Thorney, who had connections to Caxton and certainly provided copy texts to Wynkyn de Worde, owned and may have commissioned R.3.21. See Gavin Bone, “Extant Manuscripts Printed from by W. de Worde with Notes on the Owner, Roger Thorney,” The Library 4th ser. 12 (1931–32): 284–306. See also Alexandra Gillespie, “Folowynge the Trace of Mayster Caxton,” in Caxton’s Trace, ed. William Kuskin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 167–95.
These drawings were published by Paul Schumann, Der trojanische Krieg (Dresden: A. Gutbier, 1898).
For a reconstruction of the set based on extant pieces and transcriptions of the verses, see J.P. Asselberghs, Les Tapisseries tournaisiennes de la Guerre de Troie (Bruxelles: Musées royaux d’art et d’histoire, 1972), pp. 94–175.
See Samantha Riches, “The Lost St. George Cycle of St. George’s Church, Stamford” in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Colin Richmond and Eileen Scarff (Leeds: Manly Publishing, 2001), pp. 135–50.
The altarpiece has been published most recently in Frank Günter Zehnder, Katalog der AltkölnerMalerei (Cologne: Museen der Stadt Köln, 1990); Frank Günter Zehnder, Gotische Malerei in Köln: Altkölner Bilder von 1300–1550, (Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, 1989); and Rainer Budde, Köln und seiner Maler 1300–1500 (Cologne: DuMont, 1986). Images of the altarpiece can also be viewed online at the Web site for the Rheinisches Bildarchiv, http://www.bildindex.de, by searching for “Georgsaltar.”
Acts of Court of the Mercers Company, ed. Laetitia Lyell and Frank D. Watney (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1936), pp. 309, 470.
Colin Fewer, “John Lydgate’s Troy Book and the Ideology of Prudence,” Chaucer Review 38.3 (2004): 230 [229–45].
See Miriam Gill, “Preaching and Image: Sermons and Wall Paintings in Later Medieval England” in Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn Muessig (Boston: Brill, 2002), pp. 155–80.
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© 2008 Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown
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Floyd, J. (2008). St. George and the “Steyned Halle”: Lydgate’s Verse for the London Armourers. In: Cooper, L.H., Denny-Brown, A. (eds) Lydgate Matters. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610293_8
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