'Wayke been the oxen': Plowing, presumption, and the third -estate ideal in late medieval England

By examining the ways in which late medieval English commentators engage with the larger medieval tradition of the ideal plowman, this dissertation seeks to contribute to our understanding of labor as a potent site of identity, authority, and conflict in late-fourteenth and early to mid fifteenth-century England. The legacy of the ideal plowman would become increasingly elusive in late fourteenth-century England, as Chaucer, Langland, and other commentators of the period found it more and more difficult to reconcile the realities of post-plague labor practice with the unstinting ideals embodied by the mythical plowman. Increasingly appropriated by dissident interests as an explicit critique of mainstream authority, the trope of the archetypical plowman would endure as a site of controversy well into the following century, but Lancastrian commentators nevertheless adopted it both as precedent for their own labor and as an antidote to what they perceived as a wider problem of presumption in the period. The recovery of exemplary labor by Hoccleve and Lydgate and other official fifteenth-century English commentators thus attests to a wider Lancastrian nostalgia for the evident verticality of lordly privilege. To reprise Chaucer's "cherles tale" or even to explore, as does Bishop Reginald Pecock, such contemporary horizontal labor relations such as "service" and "craft" as alternative models of social order constituted a significant challenge to official efforts to promote the traditional (though increasingly obsolete) dominance of the seigniorial lord over his bonded charges as a central metaphor for royal authority.