Petrified Unrest

In 1399, Henry Bolingbroke seized the throne from Richard II. This chapter examines the crisis of legitimacy that marked the rule of Henry IV and his successors as it plays itself out in two key poems of the period: John Lydgate’s Troy Book, and Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes. These texts aim to praise and legitimate the new Lancastrian regime and to efface the facts of Richard II’s deposition. They also make key moves in the establishment of an English literary canon, in particular through Hoccleve’s influential invention of the figure of ‘Father Chaucer’. These are texts that want to claim that succession is a matter of nature, blood, or kind; of some principle of precedence woven through the fabric of created things. At the same time, they are shot through with moments of ambivalence that suggest their uncertainty about the project of Lancastrian regime change.

Out of Bounds

In the fourteenth-century romance of Gamelyn, Sir John of Boundys wills that the greater part of his land should pass to the youngest of his sons, Gamelyn, defying the convention of primogeniture. After his father’s death, Gamelyn is forced to flee to the greenwood and take up life as an outlaw. This chapter examines this narrative as it plays out in Gamelyn and in Gamelyn’s literary successors. Gamelyn was adapted by Thomas Lodge, who used it as the basis of his prose romance Rosalynde; Rosalynde in turn served as the source for Shakespeare’s play As You Like It. I argue that this line of adaptation forms a ‘testamentary fiction’: a narrative about legacies and bequests that uses the idea of inheritance to frame itself as an object of transmission. I also argue that this tradition ultimately serves to celebrate a quasi-sovereign will exercised through the possession of landed property.

Introduction

This Introduction lays the groundwork for the succeeding discussion. It argues that practices of inheritance were a key vehicle for social reproduction in English society between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries—roughly, between the lifetimes of Chaucer and Shakespeare. This fact is used to argue for a literary history that joins together what are often regarded as separate periods: the medieval and the Renaissance or early modern. This category of the premodern, in turn, signifies in relation to an idea of the modern, understood as a period in which practices of inheritance are disavowed but not abolished. Imagining Inheritance offers an account of structures of power and imagination that remain interior to modernity, even whilst they function as modernity’s defining opposite.

The System of the World

This chapter begins with Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, an account of an heiress that imagines a relationship between genealogical narrative and international trade, as Custance’s passage away from, and back towards, her identity as daughter of the Emperor of Rome is initiated by the intervention of a group of Syrian merchants. I also consider a variety of late-medieval texts preoccupied with the relationship between England’s burgeoning wool trade and traditional aristocratic ideologies. From here, I pass forward to consider Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare’s play presents us with a world of inheritance, of fathers and heiresses and their suitors; and with a world in which money grows through trade or by being lent at interest. It thus offers an account of the relationship between inheritance and an emergent world of capital, in which inheritance is not displaced but instead transformed by its passage into modernity.

‘A Very Perfect Forme of a Will’

In the late medieval and early modern periods, the last will and testament was not just a legal document; it was also a kind of literature. A range of poems and prose that engaged with the conventions of the legal last will became a feature of writing in English from the fourteenth century onwards. Sometimes fictional testaments exist as free-standing pieces of writing; often they are found embedded within larger literary texts. They focus on a range of imaginary testators, ranging from figures from myth and history, through notorious contemporaries, and animals, to the devil himself. Bequests were similarly various, including curses, farts, abstract qualities such as peace, and even the body of the testator. This chapter discusses fictional testaments by (amongst others) Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Robert Henryson, George Gascoigne, and Isabella Whitney.

Heavenly Inheritances

Christian scripture repeatedly has recourse to the language of inheritance, as in the promise offered in the sermon on the mount: ‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth’ (Matthew 5: 5). What was the relationship between this heavenly inheritance, and inheritance considered as a worldly system for the transmission of property and title? This chapter examines two motifs that focused this question with particular intensity. First, we have the tale of Jacob and Esau—of the younger son who, by divine command, supplants his elder sibling and contravenes a divinely authorized Mosaic law that mandates a form of primogeniture. Second, there is the premodern tradition of allegorical knightly quests, in which the conventions of chivalric romance, including its characteristic focus upon noble blood and its addiction to genealogical plots, were redeployed in order to produce Everyman narratives that explore questions of spiritual salvation.

Epilogue

I keep getting flashbacks to provincial streets. You’re driving. We’re touring the big civil engineering projects, looking for dead Royals. We found a minor Plantagenet earlier today, crouched in bad cement beneath a Midlands motorway pier for all the world as if he’d been garrotted on the lavatory. Yesterday it was a previously unknown illegitimate Stuart, two meters under the floor of an HS2 station with her two children, some scraps of religious writing and an older man (he’s related, maybe a brother or cousin, molecular biology will sort it out). She’s no longer the fairest of them all....

The Home-Bred Enemy

This chapter considers the naturalization of inheritance in relation to the Tudor usurpation of the English throne and its Stuart aftermath. I examine the implication of a language of succession in various early modern discussions of the opposed values of constancy and change. In the literature of the Elizabethan succession crisis, in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and in the projects superintended by the seventeenth-century noblewoman Anne Clifford we see a variety of attempts to discover in practices of inheritance a ground of psychic stability and sociopolitical domination. In each case, however, these efforts at control find themselves confronted by a recalcitrant matter—encountered on the Gaelic-speaking peripheries of the British islands, in the medieval past, in women’s bodies, or in the changeable fabric of all created things—that resists full regimentation.