Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Sothsegger

This volume brings together two fragmentary Middle English poems, written in the alliterative style of William Langland’s Piers Plowman, that critique the crisis of kingship at the turn of the fourteenth century. Richard the Redeless, a mirror for princes, employs an elaborate beast allegory to describe Richard II’s reign as egregiously lawless, implicitly blaming him for the events of 1399 that ended with his rival, Henry Bolingbroke, usurping his throne. James Dean opines that “no [other] writer … was so critical of Richard.” Mum and the Sothsegger, which translates roughly to Silence (keeping mum) and the Soothsayer (or truth-teller), uses debate poetry to satirize the bureaucratic institutions of Henry IV. The narrator goes on a journey to determine which of the two titular courses of action is best; he discovers that Sothsegger’s pragmatic wisdom wins out over Mum’s spineless sycophancy. Both texts, written in a Midlands dialect, denounce agents of political instability in their hopes for more principled governance.