Poetry and politics: "A Remembraunce of lii Folyes" in context

Abstract

The short poems in MS Digby 102 are generally taken to constitute extended commentary on early Lancastrian polity and governance. Even where they refer to particular events, however, they clearly function as applied ethics. The most clearly targeted is “A remembraunce of lii follies,” usually read as invective against John of Burgundy, 1418, but more likely to be an attack on Philip, his son, following his desertion of the English cause, and the siege of Calais, 1436. The siege occasioned an exceptional response in songs and rhymes, probably as part of a propaganda campaign, supported especially by Humphrey of Gloucester, opponent of both Philip and Cardinal Beaufort. The Digby poem should be attached to this group. As invective, it converts Burgundian policy into a catalogue of Flemish follies, drawing on English tradition and contemporary European practices; but it also engages, as right-thinking partisan, in debate on English policy. Like other Digby poems, it demonstrates what the literature of counsel could achieve in the early years of Henry VI, and testifies to an emergent public culture.