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.)
