“Languishing Lancastrian London: A City Faults a King”
Matthew Boyd Goldie

Early fifteenth-century writers John Lydgate, Thomas Hoccleve, and other poets who wrote Fürstenspiegel as well as complaints, begging poems, and occasional verse for members of Lancastrian households point out critical differences between England and London that threaten a central component of Lancastrian claims to legitimacy.  For while it is geographically true that one space contains the other, the literature suggests that their relative affiliations were neither metonymous, synecdochic, nor equivalent.  The urban context out of which and frequently about which the authors wrote their apparently patriotic texts appears in the poetry as financially unstable, subject to venality and nepotism, and lacking the royal “fredom” necessary for the city to exist as a simple mirror of the ruler’s majesty. In fact, the poets’ descriptions of the city come embarrassingly close to an exact parallel of the Lancastrians’ own recent objections to Richard II’s reign: that the court was fiscally irresponsible, that favoritism was destroying equity and good government, and that loans and grants were ruining the nation.  They are at least in direct contrast to how the mayor and aldermen present the city to their king in official correspondence. The city’s inadequacies also affect the poetic quality of the poets’ verses, the aureation, floriation, and burnishing, which we have come to understand as being so characteristic of the poetry of this time.  The poets’ complaints of poetic beggary, of dullness, rudeness, and want of skill in London in the early fifteenth century are not self-referential tropes but indicators of faultlines within Lancastrian rule.