Giving Each His Due: Langland, Gower, and the Question of Equity

Abstract

In the Prologue to Piers Plowman, the short interaction between the angel and the goliard seems to present us with a conflict between the king’s prerogative mercy and the rigor of the law.1 The angel argues that the king should clothe the naked law with mercy and the goliard retorts with the well-known etymological argument that the king gets his name from ruling well (“‘rex’ a ‘regere’ dicatur nomen habere”; l. 141) and can only rule well if he upholds the laws. This explication of lines 121–45 originates with a note by Cyril Brett in 1927.2 As proof that the contrast between justice and mercy was a pressing issue in the late fourteenth-century, Brett refers us to Book 7 of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Gower too is interested in the question of sovereignty, whether the king, in the words of a popular legal maxim, is legibus solutus, or free from the law. It is this connection between Gower and Langland’s notions of justice, or more specifically equity, that I will examine in what follows. Despite their ostensible ideological differences, Gower and Langland share a legal and political reference field that still needs further study, and that discloses some surprising similarities.