Cotton Caligula A.II: Its Intended Audience and Compiler

I left academia a long time ago, but before that I was working on Cotton Caligula A.II, a mid-fifteenth century manuscript that I would date to any time between 1454 and 1460. Several of my observations and hypotheses about this book remained unpublished, and for posterity I am documenting them here.

The book was written by a single scribe and, I believe, compiled as texts of interest came into the possession of the scribe, who I also believe was the owner of the book and the head of a household (alternatively, it was a paid scribe that the head of the household had hired — I do not find this distinction terribly important or interesting). Its courtesy poems were there for members of his household, both his own children and servants of various ages in the house. This is why obedience is a persistent theme in the book. This also suggests that extrapolating from this text that a particular social class or group in 15th century England was enamored with service as a Christian virtue is a distortion of reality caused by the fragmentary historical record: this is a book enforcing a specific ethical worldview to a group whose economic dependency on the book’s compiler meant they had little choice but to be obedient.

The romances, religious poems, and courtesy poems all have a strong didactic impetus behind them, and the entertainment value of the romances existed to make the strict ethics that the scribe was trying to enforce more palatable. The courtesy poems’ implicit hint that obedience is rewarded with financial gain in this life mirrors the religious poems’ implicit thesis that obedience is rewarded with spiritual gain in the afterlife. This is propaganda serving to restrict the will of the individuals in the household, encouraging them to conform to the demands of their household, society, and church.

What social stratum was the scribe/manuscript commissioner in? We cannot know, but the immediate bias of the late middle ages has led historians to believe it must have been a very wealthy household. However, the book is made of paper that, at the time, could have been made relatively cheaply with linen rags. That doesn’t mean it was affordable to anyone, and I would estimate the cost of the book’s production at about 10–20p, which would have represented about a week’s worth of wages for an unskilled laborer. In early 21st century terms, I’d say this book’s costliness is comparable to the cost of a new smartphone in today’s world, meaning the household in which it was produced could have been a mercantile or landed gentry class.

While I have no definitive proof to pin them down any further, my gut tells me they were in the lower range of that social class, members of an aspiring and ambitious middle class who saw politeness, courtesy, and the ethos of the gentry as valuable tools to help them get wealthier and more prestigious.

This more refined classification of an ambitious mercantile middle class audience hinges on my assumption that the book was produced in an urban environment, although this goes against what scholarship thought of the book when I left academia. At that time, the few who had written on Cotton Caligula A.II suggested its scribe was from East Anglia, which points to Norwich.

I disagree and saw dialect markers pointing more to the southwestern Midlands, and I would argue it is likely a production of Coventry. I based this on my analysis of the scribe’s dialect and language choice, and the fact that many texts would have circulated quite freely in that city. It is true that many texts could have been available in Norwich, but I don’t think that town was sufficiently connected with the rest of the country for a scribe to have ready access to texts from many different regions, yet Cotton Caligula A.II has texts from the northwest and further afield, indicating the scribe was near to a central nexus of trade. This strongly suggests Coventry as a likely candidate for the household.

An urban milieu does not mean the scribe could not have been landed gentry, but I think it less likely than the burgeoning aspiring middle class who, at the time, were fixated on proper manners as a means of ascending the social hierarchy. That the book emphasizes the pragmatic value of politeness as a way to gain social status, it reflects a socioeconomic insecurity and ambition that does not map onto the landed gentry as much as onto the merchant class.

This also suggests that, as a historical document, Cotton Caligula A.II is much more interesting for its very persistent ethical worldview than for the romances it preserves. Literary scholars of course focused on these texts, if only because many of them seem to be the kinds of texts that Chaucer parodied in his Tale of Sir Thopas, with some editors using Sir Launfal as a perfect example of the kind of romance Chaucer was making fun of. This is questionable, since we have no evidence Launfal was written before Chaucer’s death.

Instead, the book is much more interesting as an instance of a birth of modern middle class morality. The book asserts the value of obedience consistently and persistently, to the point of exhaustion for anyone reading the entire book from cover to cover. Furthermore, it actively warns against curiosity of anything going against the Christian orthodoxy of the time, with the ethos of blind obedience made most explicit in the Tale of St. Jerome, such as this passage on f.137r (here translated into modern English):

Then the judge said, “This is not so,

You are of Plato’s law and Cicero’s teachings.

Those were two great scholars before God was born,

And because they did not understand God, people say they are damned.”

The people who stood around, as the judge commanded,

Punished this good man so severely that he was in great pain.

“Mercy, mercy,” he often said, “Sweet Lord, grant your grace.

Mercy, sweet Jesus Christ, I will do this no more.

I forsake Cicero and Plato and all their teachings.

Have mercy on me, I beg you, my limbs are in terrible pain.”

At last, when he was beaten so much he did not know where to turn,

The people who stood around him, acting kindly,

Prayed to the judge and knelt down on their knees,

Asking to forgive him for his trespass and to be merciful.

At last, the judge began to soften a little.

“I shall,” he said, “at this time have mercy on this man,

On the condition that if he commits such a trespass again,

He shall be punished twenty times more severely.”

Saint Jerome agreed to this and steadfastly promised.

And the judge released him and allowed him to go safely.

This good man felt the pain in his body very severely when he woke.

And ever after that time, he renounced such books,

Feeling severely warned as his body still ached greatly.

He devoted himself entirely to books of divinity.

He studied in Bethlehem for sixty-six years

And wrote many books on divinity,

Books of such noble scholarship that they are still esteemed throughout Christendom,

Through which many scholars have since risen to great learning.

At last, this good man, as God willed,

Died in God’s service and went to the joy of heaven.

This passage is anti-intellectual and anti-curiosity, and when I first read it doing my PhD I was struck at how hostile this book was towards secular scholarship and an understanding of the physical world outside of a Christian worldview. Of course this isn’t surprising for someone with a cursory knowledge of the middle ages, but for someone who read all of Chaucer, it was jarring and disturbing. Upon first reading this passage, I immediately thought of North Korean propaganda and how it warned of the dangers of trespassing against the will of the Dear Leader. Both, it seems, speak to a need or a desire some have to be a part of the Herd, and their private hope that being obedient to those in power will result in some great reward.

I came away from Cotton Caligula A.II concluding this was a homage to docility and servitude, an example of the promise of future reward being used to subjugate the will of individuals so that they could serve a master — here the master of the household, the masters of the English nobility, and the masters of the medieval Church.

This hostility towards individualism is inherent to the social codes of conduct that the middle class developed upon their birth in the late middle ages, and I believe it is still a central feature of modern notions of politeness. Reading this book and seeing the hostility towards individuals in it had a profound impact on both how I live my life and how society treats its individual constituents, and if academia had not been captured by the middle class and its faith in the importance of conformity and deindividuation, I may have had a career deconstructing notions of politeness in society to demonstrate how this idea does not create the harmony that common sense assumes that it does.

I hope that future generations, however, when constructing the history of politeness and the rise and fall of the middle class in early modern, modern, and post-modern societies will identify how this ideological set has been used to rob individuals of their identities, instead swapping them for group identities, while also encouraging individuals to deny their own self interest so that countries may gain power, companies may gain profit, and cultural groups gain influence.

I apologize for not making this collection of thoughts more coherent or palatable; I’d love to edit this, but I’m being summoned by my cat.