Gower's Beast Allegories in the 1381 Visio Anglie (2008)

The poet himself, John Gower (c. 1330-1408), equivocates, his allegory of beasts setting about to invade London, at the beginning of the 1381 Visio Anglie, transmitted as the first book of the Vox clamantis. (1) At once, the poet's peasant-revolutionaries are not persons; and at once they are, though denatured by vice. The latter notion will appear to mitigate, by imputing a humanity to the peasant-revolutionaries that the former conceit does not allow; it also inculpates, however, redoubling justification for the slaughter of them that was occurring as Gower wrote. Mounted troops of royal retainers surrounded and killed groups of fleeing dissidents; whoever came before the royal Commissions of Inquiry was found guilty and executed, with the disemboweling of some; the gibbets made a ring around London, one account, also lining the roads east and northeast. Churls you were and churls you will remain, announced the king, in bondage but incomparably harsher. (2) Notwithstanding his various protestations to the contrary--facta referre is how the poet describes his job (prol. 30)--Gower was demonstrably not interested these facts, or not much, but more so ideological apology after the fact: justifying the ruling-class reaction was Gower's purpose writing. However, the Gowerian justifications must also create an abreaction of sympathy; for to clarify peasant culpability--justifying punishment by their subhumanity and their guilt alike--Gower needs also at least adduce (though contrary to express intention) the reasons circumstantial reality that made rebellion right: the political economy was treating agricultural labor inhumanely. (3) 1 In the early verse chapters with which the Visio Anglie begins (183-678)--before the poet's accounts of the invasion of London, making up the better, narrative part of the Visio--Gower represents the frightful mutation of a series of animal kinds (always already subhuman) into insubordinate monstrosity. Some of the kinds with which he works might be regarded as already pestiferous: flies, for examples, and frogs, less clearly (565-678); also, the foxes grouped with domesticated felines (461-504). Preeminently, however, the animals which Gower chose are the otherwise most comfortingly serviceable, productive ones: domesticated herbivores, for example (241-98); domesticated laying-fowl (505-64); house-cats and farmyard canines (379-504); and swine (299-378), with bearing-asses to begin (183-240). The asses are represented the first place as throwing off the bridles by which ordinarily they are made to serve (184, nec frenis quis moderauit eos): Que fuit vtilitas vtilitate caret ad villam saccos portare recusant, Nec curuare sua pondere dorsa volunt. [Their former usefulness is useless now. No longer will they carry sacks to town; They do not wish to bend their backs with weight.] (191-94) These creatures' unnatural unwillingness to serve is then rendered reduplicatively by their condign unnatural physical transformations, from beasts into monsters (224, transformati sunt quasi monstra). Persistently subhuman, Gower avers, quod eis nil racionis erat [for not a spark of reason did they have] (238), but now, where long ears had been before, the asses have put on sharp horns (225-27, gladius non scindit forcius illis); no longer slowly load-bearing but leaping about like free-ranging hinds (229-30, Qui de natura pigri tardare solebant, / Precurrunt ceruis de leuitate magis), and roaming off-track, beyond the barnyard, wild carnivores search of prey, with lions' hearts inside them, noble beasts, place of docile ones (185-86, Viscera namque sua repleta furore leonum / Extiterant predas repetendo suas), just as the barnyard fowl later put on eagles' mein (519-20, Qui residere domique fimum calcare solebant, / Presumunt aquile sumere iura sibi). The cows too just want to be free: Amplius ex aratro se dicunt nolle iugari, / Colla sed erecta libera ferre volunt [No longer will they yoke themselves to ploughs, / They say, but want to free and raise their necks] (249-50). …