The Prologue

It may seem bizarrely contentious to begin an article by invoking an earlytwentieth- century advertising maxim that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. But in the case of Henry VIII, two portraits, nearly thirty years apart, graphically encapsulate the extent of the king's physical decline and, paradoxically, the increasing use of his gargantuan appearance and imposing stance to self-publicise his formidable and imperious rule. The most familiar of the portraits, and the progenitor of the iconic image of Henry, is the Holbein workshop painting of the king presenting the Charter of the Incorporation of the Company of Barber-Surgeons that took place in 1540. The picture clearly draws on an earlier piece of Tudor propaganda that depicts Henry as a supreme and grandiose example of kingship as red in tooth and claw contrasted with his financially shrewd and publicly cautious father who stands behind him. This wall painting in the Privy Chamber of Whitehall Palace was destroyed by fire in 1698. Fortunately, a copy by Remigius van Leemput made in 1667 survives in the Royal Collection. The Barber-Surgeons’ portrait positions Henry seated in a Godlike pose towering above the kneeling and dourly liveried guild members and the royal physicians. He exudes pomp in his rich ermine-lined robes with crown and sword as symbols of divine power and authority. He strikes a Falstaffian figure: bloated, bearded, and fat-in-face with podgy fingers. The size of his codpiece as an emblem of potency and sexual vigour was, as rumour would have it, in disproportion to his performance. By the time of the painting he had ceased to joust or even participate in revels and dances. He was seriously disabled by injury and illness, but his response to ailment and changing circumstances was to be tyrannical to friends and foes alike.

What a contrast to the lesser known portrait, by an unknown artist, of Henry shortly after his marriage and coronation. The figure is lithe, contemplative and sensitive. Bejewelled but not extravagantly so, cleanshaven, and with long artistic fingers. Placed next to Michael Sittow's painting of the young Katherine of Aragon, when she was only a few years older than Henry in his portrait, they look as though, in another age, they might audition for Romeo and Juliet.

At the beginning of Fine Lines from the Box, a 2007 collection of essays and journalism, Njabulo Ndebele describes discovering a crate of books in his father’s garage when he was a boy, at some point in the mid-1960s. It is disguised by unused floor tiles and garden tools; on top are old copies of Huisgenoot, Zonk and Drum magazines, then Ludo and Snakes and Ladders game boards. ‘But as I got closer to the bottom of the box, my heart leapt with disbelief ‘:

Here was, in other words, a secret archive of non-fiction from southern Africa and beyond, one that marked, he writes, ‘a turning point in my life’ (9). Ndebele describes the thrill of devouring the autobiographies of Bloke Modisane and Es’kia Mphahlele as two very different approaches to the same overriding social and political reality: ‘It struck me then that oppressed people were far more complex than the collective suffering that sought to reduce them to a single state of pain’ (10). This was the beginning of ‘a reading and writing journey that has not ended’, a process of seeking to understand his native land, and to represent it in prose with an immediacy and directness that he calls ‘the art of the fine line’: ‘Writing is the one art that compels the writer to explore and express complex feelings and thoughts through an attempt at simplicity and concreteness that are yet able to preserve the complexity’ (10).

Life writing in South Africa often returns to this scene of encounter. If one unpacks that half-hidden crate, similar moments can be found nested (like Russian dolls) within the books Ndebele mentions.

In fifteenth-century London, among certain of the city's governing merchants, professionals and clerks, the language of the ‘common profit’ had begun to acquire a specific set of values. These values imbued governors with a secular authority and legitimacy they lacked by birthright and a spiritual authority they lacked by vocation. London was portrayed in administrative documents and manuscripts disseminated by the city's ruling class as a Christian community that prospered when its citizens co-operated in business and loved one another in charity. Such ideas were interchangeable – citizens who contributed to civic infrastructure performed acts of charity, while those who worshipped strengthened polity. With John Carpenter as an important vector of transmission from earlier notions of the common profit he may have encountered in the documents within the London Guildhall, these values appear to have been communicated to scribes of the Guildhall, to circles of influential, wealthy and literate professionals and aldermen, as well as their friends and colleagues in the city's wealthiest parishes. Their common profit, while it shared a set of terms with older intellectual traditions and contemporary humanist discourse, remained distinctive, local. It helped forge a vernacular commonwealth and, as with other vernaculars, was concomitant with a strong sense of shared identity and tradition.

London's ruling class espoused a specific vision of governance in their control of the written word. The production of materials that articulated notions of the common profit went hand in hand with the sponsorship and dissemination of spiritual literature among members of the lay community and lower clergy – the ‘mighty men of good’. These materials endorsed the notion that moral edification was vital to polity; that those who ruled themselves were better placed to rule others. By linking spiritual welfare with economic prosperity, the status and legitimacy of those who espoused the values of the common profit became entrenched. The circulation and sponsorship of religious literature, for instance, as in the example of the Guildhall library, demonstrated that London's governing elite recognised the authority vested in shaping spiritual discourse; and the systematic remembrance of civic leaders in monumental epitaphs inscribed the values of the common profit into the very fabric of the city.

This volume celebrates forty years of Medieval English Theatre. For those who were there at the first meeting in Lancaster in 1979 ‘to discuss the pageant waggon’, this thought is both alarming and exhilarating. In the intervening decades we have travelled all over the United Kingdom, from Southampton to Edinburgh; and next year we go to Switzerland to celebrate our fortieth birthday, on what will be, by the quirk of mathematics that means that you have your first birthday a year after you were born, our forty-first meeting.

Our Fortieth Meeting on ‘Performance and its Urban Context’ was in Sheffield, ably hosted at the Humanities Research Institute by Charlotte Steenbrugge and her team. It was a packed day, with an interesting variety of approaches. Starting with York's Corpus Christi Play, Eleanor Bloomfield looked at the Passion sequence and its relation to the Mass; Sian Witherden spoke on the exploitation of the sense of touch, especially the implications of ‘stepping in Christ's footsteps’ for acts of virtual and vicarious pilgrimage; and Meg Twycross looked at ‘The Sun in York’ (see below). The next session considered the relationship between religious establishments and the city: Aurélie Blanc on the efforts made by the Abbess of Barking to instruct and involve the local community through drama; Olivia Robinson on the political implications of changes to the processional route at Huy in Belgium, and how the relationship of the modern nuns to their own theatrical performances casts light on that of their predecessors; and Jason Burg on the dramatic ceremonies of Lincoln (the St Anne's day procession, a possible Ascension play), where the Cathedral and the Guild seem to have worked together. In the afternoon, Daisy Black spoke about the unexpectedly powerful effect of silent characters in the civic plays. Mark Chambers and Gasper Jacovac recounted their discoveries about the theatrical entertainments laid on at Durham and Newcastle for James VI and I in his 1617 tour of the North. Phil Butterworth reminded us of the recalcitrance of material objects by describing the hazards to medieval street theatre from structures which were not supposed to be there.

HERBERT of Bosham (c. 1120–c. 1194) was Thomas Becket's closest advisor and confidant, his inseparable companion through his exile and the most enthusiastic champion of his cause. A pupil of Peter Lombard and almost certainly of the school of St Victor, he was a skilled and original biblical scholar. He produced a lavishly ornamented revision of Peter Lombard's Great Gloss on the Psalms and Epistles and a commentary on the literal sense of Jerome's Hebraica version of the Psalms, a project that reveals him as more learned in Hebrew than any known Christian contemporary. When he wrote about recent events in his letters, and in his two works devoted to Thomas Becket, the Historia and the Liber Melorum, he brought to them the skills and preoccupations of a theologian. Herbert's own works and the writings of contemporaries give us a wealth of information about his career, but he was also a very self-reflective writer who revealed much about his own feelings and motivations. He was a person who would attract admiration and patronage, but also a difficult character, who complained of being shunned and neglected. His works and reputation have had a similarly chequered path, though the more attention that has been paid to his writings, the more his depth of learning, his versatility and originality have been appreciated. What follows is intended to provide a guide to the uninitiated, and direction to those who would like to know more about Herbert's life and work.

Early life and education

At the end of the Historia, Herbert gives a list of Thomas's eruditi, his ‘learned men’. Last and least of these, he says, is ‘the disciple who wrote these things, Herbert by name, English by nation, and from birth and surname “of Bosham”’. This is the name that others give him too, and there is no reason to doubt that he came from that seaside town in West Sussex, two miles west of Chichester. Herbert's birth is conventionally dated to c. 1120, which would make him a close contemporary of Thomas Becket, but this is rough estimation.

According to the chronicler Robert of Avesbury, employed in the court of the archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth, the Black Death arrived in London on, or around, the feast of All Saints (1 November) 1348. Between Candlemas and Easter 1349, the virulence of the plague necessitated the building of three new burial grounds, one at East Smithfield, another, much larger, on the site of Charterhouse Square and a third at Tower Hill. The population of the city, which had been 70,000–100,000 in 1348, declined by between a third and a half during this time. The impact of the Black Death in London, as elsewhere in Western Europe, was transformative, ushering in a period of social realignment. In the aftermath of the plague, London experienced a series of financial and political crises. The Statute of Labourers (1349), for instance, forced urban craftsmen to sell goods at 1347 prices, even though workers’ wages were on the increase. In 1351 the franchise of the city was revoked in retaliation against the misconduct of the city's governing elite, intensifying conflict between London and foreign merchants. Tensions grew between the urban workforce and the city's most powerful guilds – Vintners, Fishmongers, Grocers, Mercers and Goldsmiths – who comprised the majority of the capital's aldermen, sheriffs and mayors. This was a period that saw the brief ascendancy of John of North-ampton, draper and mayor (1381–83). Northampton and his faction claimed to represent the interests of the city's lesser guilds and, with the support of powerful allies at court (including John of Gaunt), secured a number of short-lived reforms to the governance of London that threatened the hegemony of the victualling companies.

Yet this was also a period in which the capital began to dominate national finances and trade. We see an increased role for London at the heart of the English economy, a growing reliance of the crown on London merchants and an increased prominence of London representatives in parliament. The establishment of the staple at Calais in 1361 buoyed the London economy and, as an example, between 1366–67 and 1402, London's export of cloth rose from only 18 per cent of Bristol's to 51 per cent of the national export.

Some people receiving clothing in the regency Accounts were simply part of the government structure. They had charge of castles or played a role in military readiness. Some had served the court during the reign of King James V and stayed in their positions after his death or received perquisites for past service. Others were part of the Regent's own household, though because he was the head of the court, even these might be considered to be serving the interests of the court rather than him personally. Regardless of their exact status, it is clear that the Regent felt entirely justified in using public funds to pay for grants of clothing to all of the above.

The Accounts describe many in this group as “servant.” The word is somewhat misleading to the modern mind, as it implies people of low status. In fact, many of the Regent's servants had quite high status—it was not unusual at that time for the well-born to enter service to someone of greater rank. Some were even the Regent's relations, by either blood or marriage. Hamiltons, many probably from the numerous lesser branches of the family, make up a large percentage of the Regent's household. Others, however, seem to have been of humbler origins. Thus, there are extreme variations in the amount and quality of clothing given to people in this group.

To make more sense of the wide array of people represented here, they have been divided by function: