Medieval English authors often regard aspects of the legal system to be in conflict with an endemic cultural practice, maintenance. Simply put, maintenance was the payment of a form of salary to a high-level servant by a lord. The salary this servant (or affine) might receive could consist of cash-payments, gifts, or access to lucrative official positions, including the proxy enjoyment of some portion of the lord’s judicial rights. Obviously, the mutual ties of aid and loyalty between a lord and an affine threatened impartial justice at every level, and medieval authors strove both to bring its abuses to light, and to offer alternatives. Each of my chapters sheds light on how late fourteenth-century authors articulated the relationship between different legal institutions and maintenance.
I begin by showing how the events in one of the more obscure Canterbury Tales, the Tale of Melibee, resemble a popular out-of-court settlement practice called accord. Chaucer blamed corrupt accords on maintenance. In Piers Plowman, William Langland lamented the damage that maintenance could do to legal process, even in high courts such as the Council and Court of Chancery, a concern that I also examine. John Gower spends a considerable amount of time writing about the legal profession, especially lawyers and other legal officials. I claim that Gower argues that if the king allowed maintenance and other personal considerations to influence his judgement, then legal officials would do the same; moreover, legal officials tarnish the king’s reputation since they receive their legal powers by delegation from the king. Finally, I explore Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes as presenting a solution to the problem of legal personnel’s attraction to maintenance. I argue that while Hoccleve’s explicit goal for the work is to have his annuity paid regularly for his work in the Office of the Privy Seal, he bases his right to advise the prince on his experience as a bureaucrat in a royal legal office. In sum, late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century authors demonstrated detailed knowledge of the law and used literature as a forum in which to discuss inadequacies of the system.