Depictions of the Irish and Ireland

Primary text summary and analysis: John Davies, A Discoverie of the True Causes why Ireland was Neuer Entirely Subdued

History/identity:

John Davies is a poet and lawyer during the reigns of Elizabeth and James who, like Spenser, lived for a significant period of time in Ireland; he is appointed Solicitor General 1603 and then Attorney General in 1606 in Ireland, which raises some questions about the connections between his legal rhetoric in A Discoverie and his role as a major legal official in Ireland; Hans Pawlisch notes that Davies, in a 1610 petition for another appointment, lists achievements in administrative reform that he also calls for in A Discoverie, such as getting Irish lords to assimilate/submit to the English monarchy and directing revenues in Ireland back to the crown. So it seems that he is also trying to legally enact in his present moment the policies he claims other monarchs, lords, and Anglo-Irish needed to make in Ireland in the past (and that, he claims, King James has made)

Overall summary:

The text itself tells us a lot about its intentions in its title: A Discoverie of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued, nor brought under obedience of the crowne of England, until the beginning of his majesties happie raigne (published in 1612). I’d argue that Davie’s Discoverie could be categorized, in keeping with Braden McCormack’s piece on Law and Literature, as a “retrospective hypothesis,” in that it tries to make a case for concrete causes–historical and legal precedents–that kept England, from Henry II until King James, a long span of years, from entirely “subduing” Ireland.1 It is dedicated to King James, whom he praises for finally bringing Ireland under the control of the crown, and on a wider scale he argues that a major reason why the Irish were NOT subdued was a lack of central English authority–the presence of kings and “great personages” on a regular and persistent basis in Ireland. Thus, his claim for why Ireland was not subdued is two fold 1) “the faint prosecution of the war” and 2) “the looseness of civil government” (3). In other words that English monarchs did not “perfect” their conquest of all of Ireland, instead letting several lords act autonomously while the kings themselves mostly focused their attention on affairs at home and at other places abroad; more to the point, though, he locates the main hindrance in the failure to establish English common law throughout Ireland, and criticizes the exclusion of the Irish themselves from what he considers the civilizing benefits of the law While he argues both for the need for the Sword and for the Law, his emphasis is overwhelmingly on the Law.

Structure: He covers the two defects in order, running chronologically through the reign of each monarch.

  1. Faintness of war
  2. Looseness of civil government –not communicating laws to Irish, overlarge land grants to the English, not making plantations of the forests as well as the plains
  3. What kings and deputies DID do to bring civil policies to Ireland
  4. How Elizabeth and mostly James succeeded in finally subduing Ireland.

Time period and tone compared to Spenser:

In considering Davies’ position and tone, it’s important to consider when he is writing: this work is written in 1612, after Davies has been in Ireland for 9 years; he arrived in Ireland in 1603, a few months after Lord Deputy Mountjoy accepted the surrender of Hugh O’Neill and the Nine Years War/Tyrone’s rebellion ended; the prominent rebels, at that point, surrendered their titles and armies and regained their land in return for loyalty to the king. Davies, then, comes into Ireland on the heels of major English victory. Spenser, in comparison, is writing in the 1590s, in the thick of battles between new English settlers, the Anglo-Irish, and the Gaelic Irish; as Edwards writes, Spenser himself is embroiled in struggles with native Irish as a settler on the Munster plantation, during a period where Queen Elizabeth was retreating from the use of martial law as too tyrannical and bloody. Spenser is in the midst of war and carries with him his embattled consciousness–he looks to the sword, whereas Davies, detached from these struggles, believes more firmly in the law.

Spenser and Davies start from a common claim: a lack of central authority in Ireland. Spenser attributes the civilization of the English, and their adherence to the law, to “the continuall presence of their king; whose onely person is oftentimes in stead of an army, to contain the unrulie people from a thousand evill occasions, which this wretched kingdom, for want thereof, is daily carried into.” (View 21). From there, they diverge: to Spenser, if the Irish were reformable at all it is too late: the only way to make the Irish English is battle and martial law–to annihilate those who are unflexibly rebellious–which, as Edwards demonstrates, necessarily means common law has to be pushed to the side. Spenser argues in a View that the law does not fit the Irish people. But for Davies, the only way to make the Irish English is through law: while the sword provides the path to establish law, it’s the law that actually metamorphizes people into good or bad citizens. A great defect of the kingdom, he claims, is that the English laws were not communicated to the Irish, and nor were they allowed to participate in English practices like primogeniture or be judged by magistrates under the common law; this, he says, pushes them to continue with brehon law and tanistry. While Spenser, as David Edwards writes, pushes for martial law over common law–for provost marshals with a blank check for violence rather than justices and sheriffs– and looks askance at Lord Deputy Perrot for not ordering martial commissions, Davies looks back at the deputyship of Perrot and criticizes him for not sending sheriffs and justices of the assize to newly formed shires. He details moments where Irish lords claim their desire for law: drawing on his sources, he notes Irish lords who petitioned King Edward III, individuals asking for charters of denization to make them English subjects, and the general submission to the king by Irish lords. He asks a pretty good question: “for as long as they were out of the protection of the law, so as every englishman might oppress, spoyle, and kill them without controlment, how was it possible they should be other than outlaws and enemies to the crown of England?” (96). Why, in other words, would native Irish inhabitants be keen on coming under the rule of those who tried to dispossess and oppress them? Davies’ claim is the opposite of Spenser’s claim, that the Irish are far too entrenched in Brehon law, and too long unbroken to English law, to accept it.

Davies claims, multiple times, that the English err in accepting the promise of submission without first “breaking” the Irish through war and actually “perfecting” their conquest by taking over all of Ireland. He gives the numbers of soldiers and archers paid to accompany kings and lords who enter Ireland in order to subdue it, until he comes to the conclusion on p. 74 that the reason why all of Ireland is not conquered militarily is that armies are insufficient, recalled too soon if they are sufficient, ill paid and ill governed. But while he criticizes the lack of resources put to the military conquest of Ireland, he remains fuzzier on the details and on the human cost: talking of the Earle of Sussex, he writes, “who having thoroughly broken and subdued the two most powerful and rebellious Irish septs in leinster, namely the Moors and O’Connors…[reduced] those countries into two several counties.” The focus in this passage is that the Earle of Sussex can rezone the land to make it more amenable to a central power, rather than the details of how these septs are “broken” and “Subdued” (248). Indeed, he refers to Lord Deputy Leonard Gray’s battles against Irish lords as a preparation: “this preparation being made, he first propounded and past in Parliament these laws….” From Davies perspective, in fact, now that Ireland has been conquered, the military men remain in order to “give strength and countenance to the civil magistrate”  (259). For his part, Spenser, in discussing his program for annihilating the Irish, is detailed–infamously so, in his description of famine.

For Davies, the “prime impediment” to law being properly implemented are the English “blooded” dwellers of Ireland, who exclude the Irish from the law by considering them “alien” (146), who have too much control over large swathes of land–he implies that they are mini-kings–and who have too much liberty to decide when and where the common law will be implemented. He often refers to these lords as “adventurers” and “private men,” lords who are autonomous from the monarch they technically serve under. In what, read against Spenser, could be a critique against arguments that the Irish are necessarily and utterly different, he claims that “assuredly by these grants of whole provinces and pettie kingdomes, those few English lords pretended to be proprietors of all the land, so as there was no possibility of settling the natives in their possessions, and by consequence the conquest becomes impossible without the utter extirpation of all the irish” (144). In other words, to consider the annihilation of the Irish natives means that something has gone wrong already: the English lords have gathered too much power to themselves, and taken up space that also belongs to the Irish who, if given laws, could become obedient English subjects.

A few points in the text to consider:

  • p. 166: He actually attributes the main impediment to conquest to the English, and their taking up of Irish customs. But he makes it clear he doesn’t see English and Irish law codes as “equal”–to him, the Irish have custom rather than law, and he claims that based on the “nature” of Irish customs, the people who partake in them “must of necessitie bee Rebelles to all good government”

  • p. 170: While he still calls the Irish barbarous, he does not impute this barbarism to an innate, irrevocable savageness; rather, it is circumstances, again their laws, that make them so: “these two Irish customs (tanistry and fines for major crimes) made all their possessions uncertain, being shuffled and changed and removed so often from one to another by new elections and partitions, which uncertainty of estates hath been the true cause of such desolation and barbarism in this land” He reasons out that, without having a guarantee that land and property would be passed down to a family member, they have no reason to invest in improving their land, estate, or property.

  • Davies goes so far as to attribute cultural qualities found in other ethnographic texts–a propensity for craftiness, gossip, and even a “whyning tune” in Irish speech, all of which he insists arise from being oppressed and enslaved on their own lands by exactions like coigne and livery (the accent, he presumes, also comes from suffering oppression) (177). This goes the other way too, though, Davies emphasizes: the Statutes of Kilkenny are passed, he says, after the Duke of Clarence finds English settlers have rejected English law. Submitting themselves to and intermarrying the Irish, Davies claims,  they become “meer Irish in their language, Names, apparrell, and all their manner of living” (32). While Davies mostly avoids talking about these customs at length, there seems to be an implied knowledge, on the readers part, of what they are or might be: and the point is that the origin of these “degenerate” customs is a degeneration from civil law and government.

  • p. 183: law metamorphizes: “”These were the Irish customes which the english colonies did embrace and use, after they had rejected the civill and honorable laws and customes of england, whereby they become degenerate and metamorphized like Nabuchanezzar.” Jean Feerick in “Spenser Race and Ireland,” notes that in recent uses of the word degenerate, it is a stable descriptor of a group already, at origin, “contaminated,” but that early modern use of the word implies it was an active process, where one could become degenerate: “in early modern usages it described transformations experienced by colonizers themselves” (86).2  Where English laws can civilize, Irish laws can degenerate: here is the same movement in other texts about the Irish where the English are civilizing and Irish are degenerating, but this time it comes through the medium of the laws. In the end, it’s the same fear of contamination underlying Davies call to legal precedent: the fear that the English “which hoped to make a perfect conquest of the Irish, were by theme perfectly and absolutely conquered” (166) In a way he still sees the Irish as unable to help themselves: he claims that, without their customes being “abolished by the laws of England,” the Irish countries would continue “to be found wast and desolat” till the world’s end (172).

  • p. 128-129: In fact, like Spenser, he claims that English themselves had to go through a civilizing process: he claims that the Roman general in Britain, Julius Agricola, turned the British away from being “rude and dispersed” by taking the time to “[give] them helpes in common, to build temples, houses, and places of publique resort. The noblemens sonns he took and instructed in the liberal science, preferring the wits of the Brittains before the students of France, as being now curious to attaine the eloquence of the Romaine language, whereas they lately had rejected that speech. After that, the roman attire grew to be in account, and the gowne to be in use among them, and so little by little they proceeded to curiosity and delicasies in buildings and furniture of household, in baths and exquisit banquets, and so being come to the height of civility, they were thereby brought to an absolute subjection.” In other words, civility itself causes subjection, or makes subjects willing to submit themselves absolutely to a civil, social, and cultural order. So within his logic, his constant resort to sources and legal and historical precedents, there’s a sort of sneaky, subversive argument for using law to utterly transform and erase a culture–to bring it totally in subjection to another one.3

(Davies’ Discoverie can be found on EEBO, but it is also available for free via Google books here).

1 See Bradin McCormack, “Law and Literature in Early Modern Studies,” Modern Philology, 101.1 (August 2003): pp. 79-91 .   

2 Jean Feerick, “Spenser, Race, and Ireland,” English Literary Renaissance, 32.2 (2002): pp. 85-117

3In the early modern period, “subjection” had a less negative valence than it currently does, and here it means to be subject to another power or monarch. However, I believe the claim holds true, if we follow Davies’ logic: if to be subject to a realm and its laws transforms cultures and customs, then to be absolutely subject would be to risk an erasure of that culture and its customs. 

 

Prison writings

Secondary literature: Rivkah Zim, “Writing Behind Bars: Literary Contexts and the Authority of Carceral Experience,”

(summary of Rivkah Zim, “Writing Behind Bars: Literary Contexts and the Authority of Carceral Experience,” Huntington Library Quarterly 72.2 (2009): 291-311)

Zim argues that, often, “carceral experience gives the writer authority, importance, and respect in the eyes of readers who may relate such experience to their understanding of the human condition,” and her essay seeks to explore how and why these texts use imprisonment to enhance the writer’s merit (291).

Zim notes that metaphorical prisons are widespread in the literature (the soul shackled to the body and by sin) but that even these metaphorical representations are linked to physical ones, as in the case of a Mass for imprisoned individuals who are locked up both by sin and by the prison itself; additionally, the Christian duty to look after those imprisoned, she says, has its roots in images of Jesus as prisoner, which links imprisonment to “another recurring theme in prison writing: the paradox of gain by loss,” since Jesus’ death was seen ultimately as spiritual victory (292).

In prison writing, this theological underpinning often resulted in texts that emphasized the value of physical imprisonment for the mind: Thomas Savile (“afflictions make us try our thoughts”) and Odet de la Noue (“Adversity is More necessary than Prosperity; and that, of all afflictions, Close-Prison is most pleasant, and most profitable”) stress that the afflictions and discomfort faced in prison help mold people morally, forcing them to reflect and meditate on their position and leading them to self-knowledge. This way of thinking aligns with the idiom “gold is tempered by fire:” the bad would reveal the good. Zim points to texts from antiquity (like saints’ lives and histories of “political worthies”) where writers show their imprisoned subjects as having superior insight; she notes this continuing in early modern traditions of being charitable to prisoners, and in Shakespeare’s plays, where the prison is a “crucible” that breeds wisdom in characters like Richard II and Lear, and imbues its characters with heroic qualities.

Zim sees Boethius’ Consolatio as a paradigmatic text from which these strategies for writing about imprisonment emerge, and from which a “politics of prison writing” that focuses on an individual’s personal experience dealing with adversity develops: the text shows its narrator using his “free mind” to overcome the misery of imprisonment and to handle the injustice of his confinement; this discussion of the power of the mind, Zim explains, is complemented by Boethius’ depiction of his “well-stocked mind” through his references to ancient literature and philosophy. As Zim also argues, though, ”it is the representation of this text as the work of a condemned prisoner that gave its message added authority” (298).

She then moves to three early modern examples of prison writing in order to extract a definition and “to consider how—and even whether—authority is linked to actual carceral experience” (298). In the first, a poem called “Giue me my scallop shell of quiet,” the link to an actual prison writer (long thought to be Raleigh) has been unsubstantiated, but Zim claims that putting it out as someone’s real experience makes it more enthralling (“a separation of authorship and authorization”) (299). She then notes that the Eikon Basilike, while ghostwritten by John Gauden, clearly meant to show a first person account of Charles as incarcerated king, “in his solitudes and sufferings,” because it would be politically expedient to show him that way; “condemned prisoners are known to pray and meditate, and the exemplary faith or spiritual fortitude that they display in such circumstances is deemed desirable and useful for others” (300).  In his third example, Ralegh’s “My boddy in the walls captive,” Zim reveals how the poem both petitions the queen while playing with sonnet form, making breaks with strict sonnet forms because he is tormented by his separation from the queen (more so than by his actual incarceration).

Zim then points out how changes in government and religion produced dissidents and thus political prisoners, leading to a wealth of prison writings from several classes and professions in society; these prison writers, she argues, could find “paradoxical advantages of adversity” like martyrdom, which could enhance posthumous reputation. Prisoners like Howard, earl of Surrey, found “literary means to render personal carceral experience authoritative,” and that writing could serve as resistance to political power by ensuring lasting reputation as a poet while also affirming the Christian body and soul’s separation from the state’s power (302). Women like Lady Jane Grey, Zim insists, were lent authority because of their imprisonments: “under such pressures even women wrote, and they had to say in these circumstances granted an authority that transcended the period’s usual gender roles and set important precedents for the personal creative writing of women who had spiritual and legal equality with male Christian souls (though not bodies) in a religious polity” (303).  

Captivity, she notes, also provokes dissidents to speak out in the defense of themselves or their cause, though these prison writings might shift in genre (for example, Thomas More’s more polemical writings incur imprisonment, but in prison, he writes a biblical meditation on the events leading up to Jesus’ arrest and annotates verses in his Psalter that dealt with his present condition). Thomas More’s prison writings are more personal, but, Zim argues, no less political: his Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, while ostensibly about religious persecution in Hungary, seems actually to comment on his position in England and to function as a didactic text aimed at those closest to him for facing religious tribulation. She notes that More “cannot be identified consistently with either of his speakers,” which points to his using “dialectical forms to try out the attitudes of both his speakers in order to practice resistance: to prepare, in advance, comforting arguments against a specific kind of tribulation—his own fear of spiritual failure” (a fear echoed in Tower works comparing himself with St. Peter) (306). Moreover, putting More’s words in their original and specific prison context reveals more than just the words themselves might—his final prayer, written in the margins of his Book of Hours, is located next to woodcuts of the nativity and Christ carrying the cross, placing his poem (and himself) in an imitatio Christi tradition and contributing to a tradition of last words. More, she argues, “recognized the political value of writing that projected ideas and images of suffering humanity in contexts calculated to authorize that experience,” an advantage enhanced by the fact that a prison writing bolsters the fame of the imprisoned writer while undercutting the power of the ones doing the imprisoning (who end up fixed in the text as persecutors)   (308).

Prison writing also allows the writers to present interpretations of their past and record their current trials; they can produce something to remember them by. John Bunyan enacts another text-authorizing tactic to deal with the issue of insecure memory in recounting past life (a problem of autobiography generally): he relies on the authority of the Word of God to show how scriptural texts spurred his discovery of God and his grace; especially notably, though, is his claim that incarceration yields this deeper relation to the Bible: “those Scriptures that I saw nothing in before, are made in this place and state to shine upon me” (309). In other words, his suffering causes immense spiritual benefit; his past spiritual life becomes a way of interpreting his current circumstances. And demonstrating his spiritual growth has immediate public benefits: publishing his work as prison writing could boost his authority as a spiritual educator, the prison making him recognizable as a “particular kind of Christian” (309).

Zim concludes that it is important to consider the “artistic and fictive elements of any rhetorical performance,” even those claiming straight autobiographical fact (310). She lists a set of contrasting elements that paradoxically constitute prison writing “it is paradigmatic yet particular; constrained by convention yet capable of rising above these constraints; often literary in its strategies yet also historically and politically situated, in a particular prison under specific circumstances” (311). In other words, it is important to attend to the specific historical/political/geographical situation of any given prison text, but we can also recognize rhetorical moves and strategies anchored in prison writing as a genre or found across prison writings, and we can also recognize ways that prison writers innovate the genres on hand even when (especially when?) constrained by censorship or trying to reach an audience outside the prison. She says, finally, that in giving a “politics of prison writing” through which we might read prisoner texts, she argues for a series of practical functions, starting from late antiquity, for people writing from prison, especially those for whom power is at stake. She lists a few: defending/promoting values, bearing witness to those outside the prison in order to save reputation and/or create a memorial image, as comfort to the tried and trying writer, and overall, to “provide evidence of those responses in terms that persuade the prisoners’ associates and first readers, as well as subsequent ones, to acknowledge the authority of carceral experience” (311).

 

Prison writings

Two late medieval writings about imprisonment: George Ashby, “Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet 1463”

Unlike the complaint against Fortune, this poem is located in a specific place, a specific time, and a specific prison, The Fleet. But it begins, as many medieval poems do, by setting the season: unlike the many medieval dream visions that first describe the flowering of spring, the Complaint portrays the onset of autumn. During this seasonal shift, the narrator is “comyttyd geynst right and reason/Into a pryson, whos name the Flete hight” (7). The poem sets itself in the Boethian tradition, of a prisoner who is unjustly punished (“Because of my draught and my bryngyng up/I have suffryd thys and other spoylyng”) (22). He notes he must bear this false accusation until “God or the juge” release him; the poem thus sets up an equivalence in the roles of God and judge that mingles together metaphorical and concrete prisons: while it was a common to conceive of the soul as imprisoned in the body, the narrator is also physically imprisoned in the Fleet. This equivalency makes his meaning here murky: will God release him from prison, or from his body—or from both?

At line 29, unlike the nameless (possibly fictional) prisoner of the Complaint Against Fortune, the narrator identifies himself: George Ashby. This supports Joanna Summers’ argument, in her book on late medieval prison autobiography, that prison writers often wrote autobiographical material in order to recuperate their reputations or promote themselves (and she specifically writes about Ashby, though I have yet to get to that chapter; I will update this entry later). In these cases, it would be important to identify yourself in order to defend yourself and/or find patrons willing to act on your behalf. Naming himself so early emphasizes that to know the speaker is important, and that he wants the narrative definitively attached to the name George Ashby (and I would say, from what I know, that to find this kind of direct naming in a medieval poem with a first person voice is fairly rare: dream visions, for example, have narrators, but they are not usually identified as specific people). Moreover, he later dates the poem, which, as the TEAMS edition of his poem notes, is “fairly unusual;” in line with naming himself in the poem, the TEAMS edition also quotes Scattergood’s suggestion that Ashby dates it as a way of “seeking to ensure that he was not forgotten” (qtd in Mooney and Arn, p. 274).

Ashby repeats the complaints of the unnamed prisoner in the Complaint Against Fortune that he has been abandoned by his friends, yet this complaint has little of the starkness that the latter narrator’s does. Whereas the anonymous prisoner laments the loss of friendship before accepting the grace of God, Ashby first makes it clear that, while his heart is grieved “hevyly and sore,” he believes that imprisonment serves as his “chastisement and lore,” and prays to God for “dew pacience” (32, 33, 35). Thus before he gets into the gritty details of his punishment, he frames it as an experience from which he will get devotional merit. Whereas the anonymous prisoner decides to be patient when he realizes he has no other choice, Ashby asserts early in the poem that he will wait patiently, in devotion to God, and assumes that there is some lesson to be learned from his confinement.  The tone, then, is immediately less dire than the Complaint Against Fortune, even as it relates some of the same discomforts and unpleasant realizations that prisons bring. He even, later in the poem, claims that people who suffer should “of trouble be mery and glad/Than therof be grogyn, hevy, and sad” (154), in contrast to the tone of the anonymous prisoner in the Complaint Against Fortune, which is a far cry from merry.

Ashby also expresses some more pragmatic fears than the anonymous narrator of the other poem does. For example, he fears the debt that will accrue to him as a result of paying for accommodation at the Fleet: he not only prays but says “to God I clepe, call, and cry/To help me out of det or I dy” (48-49). This hints at fears of social and financial ruin. He also seems concerned not only about being abandoned by friends generally but also about going from a position of prestige and power—in service of the king and queen—to having people “revylyng [him] with unfyttyng language” and underestimating his wit and cleverness (74). He is concerned, in other words, with being inappropriately represented while and because he is in prison, and with the change of status that imprisonment brings. We also get signs of his social role—clerk of the Office of the Signet officially, but also his reputation of having “pen and inke evyr at my syde” (68). By describing his dedication to the role (“nat  sparyng” to ride with the king and queen, “redy to accomplysshe theyre commandment,”  as Signet for them “full fourty yere”), he defends his name, and reminds his readers of an identity that he has lost (67, 70, 64). He makes sure that his readers know that, despite being imprisoned, he has an identity and role outside of the prison and that he was, moreover, exceedingly good at this role. Thomas Freeman, in his article in the Huntington Quarterly in 2009 on the rise of prison literature, argues that prisoners in the medieval and early modern period were viewed as sinners rather than social miscreants, and because everyone was a sinner, prisoners were thus not abnormal figures outside the social order. Yet this poem from the fifteenth century, in its narrator’s insistence on being associated with his social identity outside of the prison, indicates that there is a danger of losing that identity when one is known as a prisoner.

While Ashby can no longer (at least for now) act in his role as clerk for the Office of the Signet, however, he still reclaims his identity as a writer by proposing to “wryte of trouble rehersall/How hyt may be takyn in pacyence” (113-114). He ensures by this tactic that he can hold onto part of his identity from outside of the prison, though he shifts mode into a more prison-associated and appropriate mode. More specifically, he turns to the didactic mode: as the TEAMS version of this poem notes, he “takes on the role of Lady Philosophy, who tells Boethius he has forgotten who he is…a creature of God.” In other words, he refashion his identity by mobilizing a prison-writing identity authorized by previous writers in prison and by Boethius himself. This allows him to take his identity outside of the prison, that of a writer, and to give himself authority in that position by taking on a mode that has sanctioned other prison writers.

However, as the TEAMS editions also notes, the didactic thrust of this poem is somewhat undermined by the explicit at the end, which calls the prison a “sepulture,” or tomb (344). While this seems to contradict the theme and message of the poem, I would argue that there is an underlying consistency to it: the prison is both a tomb that locks people away from other social opportunities and their usual place in the social order and a place that allows for a spiritual transformation that can be made public through writing—which allows the writer to be seen and remembered even when other social identities have been stripped from them. This poem points to the prison’s status as a space and place that both threatens identity and provides new ways to bolster it; a place that undermines the social credibility of the prisoners and acts as a potential tomb while also giving them “carceral authority” as writers, where writing thought to come from the prison is seen as automatically having value because the prison “forges” a more devotional attitude (a concept that Rivkah Zim explores in her essay on early modern prison writings and writers). This poem points to the social dangers of being a prisoner, of often balancing on a ledge between being respected and remembered as a spiritual authority—of even regaining social identities through patrons outside of the prison reading one’s work—and of being entombed, lost and forgotten. Writing from prison, then, provides a crucial strategy for staying on one side of that line.

(This text is graciously provided by the TEAMS Middle English Text Series at the University of Rochester. It can be found here.)

Prison writings

Two late medieval texts on imprisonment: Complaint of a Prison against Fortune

An allegorical text and short dialogue, The Complaint of a Prisoner against Fortune  features a prisoner railing against Fortune, who responds briefly and then disappears from the poem. In the first 28 lines, the prisoner bemoans Fortune’s ever shifting nature, but hopes nonetheless that she will favor him once more: “torne thy whele that I may ones arise” (21). Though he mostly addresses Fortune’s fickleness, he notes the “myschaunce” and desolation he suffers in prison at the beginning and end of this first section, anchoring the source of his despair in his imprisonment, where he “lyes” and “suffers” (28, 2). Fortune, in her 22 line interlude, has no sympathy for the prisoner, and little concern that he has been, in the eyes of worldly law, unjustly imprisoned; though he may be innocent of the crime for which he was condemned, God is punishing him for “synnes ..that now perauntre ful litel are in thi thought” (33). Moreover, she says that suffering on earth allows him to be saved in heaven, framing his imprisonment as a kind of gift of grace. She quotes lines about patience and being strong in spirit in Latin, her formality in contradistinction to the prisoner’s passionate plea. Thus she shifts the focus from fortune’s variability to God’s grace, and sanctions the prisoner’s stay in prison as right because it is divinely wished for, even if it is an unfair by earthly standards; she undermines his complaints about Fortune by switching attention to God, and his complaints about unfair imprisonment by highlighting the spiritual benefits of grace and the character-building qualities of  unjust confinement. The prisoner, however, is not swayed by this reasoning; he dismisses Fortune and addresses himself to the three Fates. To them he complains that he is not so distressed that the end of his life may be drawing near, but that they ordained his death be in a prison: he wishes for any other means or place to be the means of his death. To him, it is being imprisoned rather than having to die that is so upsetting.

At line 64, he gets to the heart of why being imprisoned distresses him so: he grieves the loss of his good name and reputation, of which imprisonment has stripped him. He resents that he can gain a bad reputation so easily, because people slander one another so easily, while  “goode loos slepith and lith ful soft” (70). Moreover, he has lost his friends, who have abandoned him in his time of need, and the bareness of the statement “I have no friende that wil me now visite” imparts how extreme the loneliness of his imprisonment is (85). Though scriptures also say that Christians should comfort the imprisoned, he has encountered no comforters; only Echo repeats back his words (and he seems to want, very much, someone to “bere [him] witness”). It is the creature comforts he seems to miss: he wants small, concrete things, like having someone listen to him or give him some water to drink; he wants affection and contact, someone to ask him, “Friend, wiltow ought with me?” (79). His affective language in this part of the poem stresses pain and sorrow: he is grieved “so sore,” he has “sorow inowgh,” he has a “hevyness” that he has no one to talk to about. Nor can he unload his sorrow, because “to telle my sorwe my wittes bien al bare:” it is beyond his powers of expression, and in fact drains his wits.

The prisoner accepts, by the end of the poem, that he must submit and pray to God and Mary: he asks for their pity and repents his sins, while also throwing off his reliance on Fortune and the Fates. Thus, he seems to have followed Fortune’s advice to rely on God and to view imprisonment as a way into heaven; he admits that suffering in prison will release him from later pains in purgatory. The TEAMS text series introduction stresses that, in this complete rejection of Fortune, the prisoner acts in a proper Boethian manner. Yet this acceptance does not override the prisoner’s critique of what prison does to the people it confines, nor does the narrator’s wounded tone leave the poem. “Swerte is none,” he cries, and because no security in guaranteed, he is forced to conclude “Than best is this world to sette at nought/And mekely suffre al adversité/That may us availe of synnes that we have wrought” (100, 106-108). In other words, he accepts fortune’s reproach because he has no other option; if the earth only yields an insecure existence, if death is always to come, and if he has no escape from this prison, the only way he can avoid despair is to suffer through imprisonment and hope that he “may” do some penance for his sins (108).

Imprisonment has caused him to learn painful things about the world, and that pain leads him less to find comfort in heaven than to feel betrayed by his hopes about the world (“Fy on this world; it is but fantasie!”)(99). Nor does he come to terms with the “myschaunces” of imprisonment. Thus, his decision to suffer quietly, wait for death, and hope for heaven does not erase the afflictions of imprisonment: its disastrous effect on his name and the pervasive loneliness that arises from being abandoned by those he thought were his friends.

In the final lines, which are addressed to Mary, the prisoner concludes, “Now, lady swete, I can no more now sey,/But rewe on me and help me whan I dey” (139-140). The narrator is rendered silent by the acceptance of his condition; not even Echo will bear witness to his existence now. The unsettling conclusion seems to be that for the prisoner to assent to the grace of God through imprisonment, he must lose his voice or any stake in his earthly life; he must bear out the rest of his life waiting. We are left with the image of a silent prisoner, whose only option is to hope for Mary’s pity and for the quick approach of death.

While various texts emphasize the spiritual boons of imprisonment, this poems gets at the agony of the experience itself, the intensity of the suffering that must happen in the present, worldly moment. Thus the poem, while repeating these spiritual justifications for imprisonment, actually highlights how excruciatingly distant a future heaven is from an unjust, lonely, painful, and insecure present.

(This text is graciously provided by the TEAMS Middle English Text Series at the University of Rochester. It can be found here.)

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