Domestic Flyting

Domestic flytings have been preserved as much more elaborate affairs than their cross-cultural counterparts and in many ways they are libels writ large, in terms of their physical length, the number of protagonists involved and the lavishness of abuse employed. In fact, just as there is an analogy between the libel and the duel, there is also one between domestic flyting and the tournament which might be said to operate on a similar scale of extravagance. Like the tournament, the flyting is a feat of aggressive display before royal authority, envisaging the king as witness to the contest and appealing to him to adjudicate in the dispute and the competitors fight for the poetic crown or laureateship symbolising royal favour. The origins of flyting can be found both in court festivities and, more seriously, in the formal process of bringing charges of treason against a personal rival before the king. In Raphael Holinshed’s account of a quarrel in 1397 between Thomas Mowbray, First Duke of Norfolk, and Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford (later Henry IV), adapted by Shakespeare in Richard II, is found an archetypal scenario