John Gower and the law: legal theory and practice

England in the late fourteenth century witnessed the first flowering of what has variously been called a bureaucratic or documentary culture. ² We might also call it simply a “legal” culture. Increasingly, the biographies of Chaucer, Usk, Hoccleve, and others have been read in connection with their judicial work, or in the context of legal upheavals such as the Merciless Parliament (1388). Not without reason, John Alford once observed that “[t]he association between literature and law has never been more impressive…than in Medieval England.” ³