Skelton, Poems Against Garnesche, 1514, William Gray, Thomas Smyth, 1540, Thomas Churchyard, Thomas Camel, 1551, John Taylor, William Fennor, 1614

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equivalents, are highly heterogeneous. They do not recognise formal or generic boundaries and protagonists employ all available techniques to bring their adversaries to their knees. Whereas nipping epigrams and biting satires generally abide by certain formal rules, the flyting, for which there is no equivalent epithet to encapsulate its function, is a display of mastery in a variety of themes, forms, meters and genres and uses an elaborate array of invective weaponry. The four flytings I examine all employ different forms of variety. In Skelton’s Poems Against Garnesche (c.1514) he attacks Christopher Garnish upon the grounds of, among other things, his social status, physical appearance, ancestry, personal hygiene and profane sexual habits. The flyting between William Gray and Thomas Smyth (1540) is more uniform, although Smyth’s attacks upon Gray do feature a glaring contradiction as he seems to accuse him of a religious nonconformity that is simultaneously papistical and sectarian. In contrast, the exchange between Thomas Churchyard and Thomas Camel (1551-2) is marked by its generic variety and the protagonists employ dream allegory, pastoral and invectives derived from formal legal disputation against one another. Finally, in the flyting between John Taylor and William Fennor (1614), the formal variety employed is one of the exchange’s most noticeable features and includes epigrams, anagrams, epitaphs, proems, dedications and epilogues as well as the main invectives. ²⁰³

Domestic courtly flytings also appear intermittently in Scotland, including those between Dunbar and Kennedy (c.1495), James V and Sir David Lindsay (1555) and Alexander Montgomerie and Sir Patrick Hume, Baron of Polwarth (c.1580). Although

trial by combat, pp.98-9).

²⁰³ The hiatus between the two latter flytings here is best explained by England’s being ruled by female monarchs between 1553 and 1603. Courtly flyting appears to be a distinctly masculine pastime and such uncouth exchanges of insult would be unlikely to be perceived as effective means of currying favour at the courts of either Mary or Elizabeth, which perhaps explains Puttenham’s apparent distaste for the practice.

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