Robert S. Sturges “‘Nerehand nothyng to pay or to take”: Poverty, Labor, and Money in Four Towneley Plays.”

Robert S. Sturges “‘Nerehand nothyng to pay or to take”: Poverty, Labor, and Money in Four Towneley Plays.” Money, Morality, and Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Edited by Vitullo, Juliann and Diane Wolfthal Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010. Print.

In his chapter, Sturges sets out to take up the challenge set forth in David Aers' seminal 1987 essay. Specifically, Aers called for critics to move away from constructing "harmonizing" readings of medieval literature and instead more fully consider the role of social, economic, class, and labor issues that impact these texts. Aers' critique is similar to that raised by John Watts over the construction of grand narratives of history, and the critical approach seems similar to the practice of Landesgeschichte in current German scholarship. 

To get back to the article at hand, Sturges moves to apply Aers' suggested approach to four Towneley plays that critical consensus attributes to the Wakefield Master, namely The Killing of Abel, Noah and his Sons, The First Shepherd's Play, and The Second Shepherd's Play. For Sturges, the fact that each of these can be attributed to the Wakefield Master is significant as he considers the role of labor, class, and economics in Wakefield specifically and how this dynamic impacts these plays. Medieval historians (such as Joel Kaye, Diana Wood, and Martha Howell) commonly agree that late medieval Europe saw an increase in the economic power of the lower classes. However, Sturges points out that Wakefield was still heavily dominated by the manorial system of agricultural labor rather than one that allowed agricultural laborers to exchange their labor  in a market, physically moving to work in areas offering higher pay rates. According to Sturges, the inability of laborers in the manorial system to take their labor to better markets, along with their awareness of the potential for increased economic success that market, lead to both increased fantasies about the freedom granted by monetary remuneration and jealousy for those participating in these forms of exchange. 

In the four plays from the Towneley cycle, Sturges reads the impact of this manorial labor into concerns of the lower classes. Cain, for example, views tithing as an unfair tax imposed upon him from his manorial lord despite his poor crops, and the shepherds from The Second Shepherd's Play bemoan their poor condition as a direct result of mistreatment from the local gentry. Despite these complaints, however, any move to better one's lot in life is met with judgment and condemnation. Cain's refusal to pay his tithe is highly balsphemous, and Mak's theft of the lamb to feed his starving family is punished. While it would be a mistake to take this reading dogmatically, which would simply be building a new grand narrative for John Watt to decry, taking the role Wakefield's specific economic and labor conditions into these plays does add an interesting perspective and possibly provides context for the many economic issues in these plays.