Churchyard, Camel, 1551, 1540, Priscilla Bawcutt, flyting, Scotland, John Taylor, Water-Poet, balladeer, William Elderton

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Churchyard and Thomas Camel during 1551-2 and nine in one between Thomas Smyth and William Gray in 1540.

Priscilla Bawcutt, in one of her studies of flyting in Scotland, describes the word as “a useful but slippery term” owing in part to its “non-literary uses and contexts”, such as “noisy quarrels and arguments, carried on chiefly by the lower orders, and – so it was insinuated – by women”. ¹⁶⁰ The sort of flyting with which this study is concerned is an exclusively literary, masculine activity participated in most usually by members of the gentry, and also by socially aspirant town wits such as John Taylor, the Water-Poet and the balladeer, William Elderton. ¹⁶¹ It is a dialogic verse tournament conducted usually between individuals of relatively near social standing whereby the protagonists strive to present themselves as the most loyal and patriotic servants of the crown and to expose their adversaries as its enemies, whether they represent rival nations, or are fellow subjects.

OED 1 describes “fliting” or “flyting” as an invective competition “in which two persons assailed each other alternately with tirades of abusive verse”. This definition draws attention to the oral, ephemeral aspect of flyting; however not all these verse combats find their way into manuscript and print incidentally, and several of those extant appear to have been conceived either initially or exclusively as literary rather than verbal disputes. In this section I will examine two distinct but closely related types of verse flyting; one of which is a cross-cultural war of words voicing national rivalries, and the other of which is a domestic affair in which the protagonists express real or feigned animosity for one another as a form of entertainment and a display of wit in which political or theological differences

¹⁶⁰ Bawcutt (1992), p.222.
¹⁶¹ Rollins finds evidence that Elderton was an attorney and suggests that “his social position and education must have been better than is usually thought”, ‘William Elderton: Elizabethan Actor and Ballad-Writer’, SP, 17 (1920), 199-245 (p.206).

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