(Wynnere and Wastour)
(ca. 1352–1353)
Winner and Waster is a DREAM VISION poem of 503 extant lines, written in a Northwest Midland dialect of MIDDLE ENGLISH. The poem is a political ALLEGORY composed during the reign of King EDWARD III, who appears as a character in the poem. Its verse form marks it as part of the ALLITERATIVE REVIVAL popular in the west and north of England in the 14th century, and as such it is related to poems like SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, The ALLITERATIVEMORTE ARTHURE, and particularly The PARLIAMENT OF THE THREE AGES, with which it has often been compared. Some scholars have suggested that the author of Winner and Waster is the same poet who wrote the Parliament, but most think the common authorship unlikely. Winner and Waster survives in a single 15th-century manuscript in the British Library (Additional MS 31042), which also contains the Parliament of the Three Ages. But the manuscript is incomplete and the text faulty in places due to scribal error. The poem begins with the narrator falling asleep near the bank of a river in the west country. In his dream he sees two opposing armies approach one another on a great plain. One army, led by Winner, includes the pope and cardinals and a number of friars, as well as lawyers and merchants. With Waster, leader of the other host, are the nobility and the military—knights, squires, and bowmen. On a hill above the plain is the pavilion of the king—identified as Edward III by the motto of the Order of the Garter (“Evil be to him who evil thinks”). The king sends a great baron (presumably his son the Black Prince) to forbid the armies to do battle, and to require their leaders to come before the king and explain themselves.Winner and Waster do so in a series of eight speeches alternating between the two. Thus the text becomes a DEBATE POEM of the sort popular in the later Middle Ages.Winner, who represents those who work to create and to attain wealth, speaks first.He defends the need for producers of wealth in society, and condemns those who, like Waster, squander resources. The figure of Waster in the poem, however, represents not only profligates, but anyone who consumes what has been manufactured. Thus while the laziness and prodigality ofWaster may be condemned in the poem, so too is the miserliness and selfishness of Winner. Both groups, though mortal enemies, are necessary in society. In the end the king seems to realize this. As in most debate poems, the argument has no clear victor, and the king settles the dispute by sending Winner to live with the pope in Rome (where he is most popular) and Waster to visit the shops of London, apparently to stimulate the economy. The manuscript breaks off before the end of the king’s speech.
The poem may reflect class struggle between the bourgeoisie (as “winners”) and the nobility (as “wasters”) in the economic crisis following the BLACK DEATH. It also seems influenced by Aristotle’s view of wastefulness and miserliness as extreme vices, with ideal moral behavior being the mean, the courtly virtue of liberality. In either case, the poet suggests that wise government is needed to solve the economic problems of society. The poem may reflect political events after the Black Death, when the Statute of Laborers (1351) and the Treason Statute (1352) were enacted to curb societal unrest, and the poet may be writing to urge the king to take decisive action to ensure order. However, the manuscript as we have it was hardly intended for a courtly audience, since it is interrupted periodically by a call to drink, as at a tavern. Such interruptions would be consistent with a MINSTREL performance for a middle-class audience, and it is possible that what has survived is a transcription of a minstrel’s copy of a poem originally intended for a noble patron. How well known the poem was in its own day is hard to judge, given the single manuscript that survives, but some scholars believe that Winner and Waster was influential on another Northwest Midland alliterative poem, William LANGLAND’s PIERS PLOWMAN.
Bibliography
■ Gardner, John, trans. The Alliterative Morte Arthure, The Owl and the Nightingale, and Five Other Middle English Poems. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971.
■ Ginsberg,Warren, ed.Wynnere and Wastoure and the Parlement of the Thre Ages. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Published for TEAMS by the Medieval Institute, 1992.
■ Trigg, Stephanie, ed. Wynnere and Wastoure. EETS 297. London: Oxford University Press, 1990.