Producing biographies on late-medieval MPs comes with its unique set of challenges, notably the lack surviving records indicative of their character. Dr Simon Payling of our House of Commons 1461-1504 section explores how poetic memorializations help paint a more rounded, if overly positive, picture of two MPs: Sir John Berkeley (Leicestershire, 1372) and Sir John Burgh (Shropshire, 1445, 1453).
The limitations of the sources mean that the biographies of late-medieval MPs, at least for those uninvolved in matters of national politics, often amount to little more than genealogical detail and a list of appointments to administrative office. Wills and legal records can provide context and colour, but, in the general absence of private letters (a few notable collections aside), more vivid sources are scarce. Among the most revealing of these rarer sources are the handful of literary memorials that attach to certain MPs. A few were authors in their own right, most notably Geoffrey Chaucer, MP for Kent in 1386; others have literary memorials of a different sort, namely poems dedicated to them. Two poems written by the Welsh poet, Guto’r Glyn (c.1412-c.1493) in about 1450 throw an unusual light on Sir John Burgh (1414-71); and an anonymous ‘lament’ records the noble character and sad circumstances of the death of Sir John Berkeley in 1375.
The poems to Burgh and his wife are undated, but internal evidence places them in the early 1450s, that is, halfway through his long career and before his standing had been compromised by his support of the house of Lancaster during the civil war of 1459-61. The poems are in the tradition of praise poetry, generally commissioned by the patron to whom they are dedicated. As such, they reflect the interests of both patron and poet. The way in which the patron wanted to be described was modified and shaped by the worldview of the poet. Part of that worldview was the necessity of amplifying the patron’s virtues through stylized and often exaggerated language.
The first part of the poem praises Sir John for the qualities that any late-medieval lord would pride himself in possessing. The poet lauds his honesty and fairness as a judge, ‘maintaining judgement at it should be. No cold pomp his, no violation of the weak’; his generosity (from which the poet himself had handsomely benefited), ‘No two earls in their life, have given the goods he has given’; and his courage, ‘powerful cannonball in the heat of battle’. The second part has a different focus, reflecting the interests of the Welsh poet as much as those of his English patron. It lauds Burgh’s descent, not through his father, who hailed from northern England, but through his mother, Elizabeth Mawddwy, heiress of the small Welsh Marcher lordship of Mawddwy. Through her, he was ‘of the lineage of Idwal Iwrch’, in other words, a descendant of the ancient Kings of Gwynned, and of the legendary Welsh King, Hywel Dda (d.c.950).
An emphasis on distinguished pedigree also characterizes the poem, written at the same time, to Burgh’s wife, Joan Clopton, a wealthy English heiress. She is described, without entire regard for accuracy, as ‘kinswoman of England and her crown’ from the ‘same stock as the old earl of Warwick’. This descent is used as one explanation for her outstanding personal qualities: ‘from the earls of Warwick, her countenance is like snow’ and ‘from the Besfords (her maternal family), gold are her fingers’, a reference perhaps to the property that descended to her from her mother. The poet adds more lavish praise: ‘She is the ruby gold of the earth and of women, the colour of the ocean’s foam … a sun among noble ladies’. Her greatest quality, however, was, from the poet’s point of view, her skill as a healer. Her care, together with that of her daughter, ‘Mistress Isabel … the most courteous young lady in England’, cured him of a pain in his back which had left him sleepless and ‘crooked’. He concluded that he ‘needed no physician’s plaster any more, only lady Mawddwy’. This personal anecdote lends a rare note of lived experience to an otherwise highly conventional form.
To the modern reader, notwithstanding the reference to the Burgh women as carers, these poems appear rather unrevealing and, in their purpose and conventions, detached from reality. No doubt Burgh and Joan were possessed of many praiseworthy qualities, and, in the story of Sir John’s long career, not much can be found to his discredit. Yet his devotion to virtue and justice may not have been as unstinted as the poet professed to believe. In 1466, for example, he resorted, allegedly at least, to rather desperate measures to secure a husband for his illegitimate daughter, Anne. He seized a wealthy townsman of Shrewsbury and imprisoned him at his castle at nearby Wattlesborough, releasing him only when the townsman agreed to marry her.
In contrast, the anonymous lament for Sir John Berkeley of Wymondham in Leicestershire offers a more intimate and personal perspective. The author appears to have been a member of the knight’s household, and the poem, written shortly after Berkeley’s death in July 1375, reflects a close personal connection. The poet, sitting by himself at the beginning of a hunt, as the hunters noisily gathered, regrets the absence of one who would usually have been among them, ‘a knyght curteis, comely and kynde’. He praises his late master’s qualities in a rather similar way to those much later employed by Guto’s Glyn for Burgh. He was generous to his servants: he gave his foresters ‘gode giftes and clad hem in grene’. He was just and forgiving: ‘he rested on right’ and was ‘gracious and gode til those that hem greved’. His household was cultured and hospitable, a culture reflected in the poetic abilities of the author. That absence is then explained. The knight had left home to fight in Brittany: ‘He busked in to Breteyn with bacenets bright’ at the head of a ‘semmeli compeny’. The campaign proved, from the English point of view, a dismal failure, and, for Berkeley it proved fatal. The poet appears to have been in that company, for he implies that he was with Berkeley when his master was struck down with ‘a sekenes smert’. The closing lines of the poem movingly show the knight’s concerns on his deathbed. He sent a servant, perhaps even the poet himself, to ‘my wif to Wymondam to wern hir of my woo’, in the confidence that, ‘Of messe and of matens of me she wil do mynde’.
Such sources have obvious limitations. Their purpose was to reflect only the positive virtues of their subjects, and these virtues are sketched in rather standard terms. Yet they provide details that administrative records cannot supply. They evoke the rhythms of household life, the reciprocal obligations between a lord and his social inferiors, and the virtues on which a lord’s reputation depended. Most strikingly, they capture moments of personal connection: Guto’r Glyn’s recovery under the care of Burgh’s wife and daughter, and the Berkeley poet’s quiet grief as he recalls his master’s final campaign and dying message. In the absence of letters or self‑description, such poems offer rare access to the emotional and reputational landscapes in which MPs lived, and the historian is left to regret that more of them do not survive.
SJP
Further reading
https://www.gutorglyn.net/ for the poems to the Burghs and the English translation quoted here.
H. Fulton, ‘Guto’r Glyn and the Wars of the Roses’, Gwalch Cywyddau Gwŷr: Essays on Guto’r Glyn and Fifteenth-Century Wales, ed. Evans, Lewis and Parry Owen (2013), pp. 53-68.
For biographies of Sir John Burgh and his father, Hugh: The Commons, 1386-1421, ii. 417-19; 1422-61, iii. 643-9.
T. Turville-Petre, ‘The Lament for Sir John Berkeley’, Speculum, lvii (1982), pp. 333-9.
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