John Skelton and Christopher Garnish

Skelton’s flyting with Christopher Garnish, of which Garnish’s contribution has been lost, abounds with enthusiasm for invective and demonstrates a level of satirical confidence that suggests the laureate feared no official reprisals or repercussions. Written, as he claims at the end of each of his four flytings, “Be the kynges most noble commandement”, this royal command flyting serves the purpose primarily of an entertainment that enjoyed royal approval and licence. The stakes are nowhere near so as high as in the Bolingbroke-Mowbray exchange or in the two subsequent flytings I examine between Smyth and Gray and Churchyard and Camel where accusations of treason are exchanged in invectives contextualised by contemporary political turmoil. Instead, the protagonists exchange imputations of knavery and ignoble origins that, although they may have their basis in real personal animosity, are delivered in a controlled, ritualised context in which heated feelings might be vented and diffused safely rather than exacerbated.

Skelton’s participation in this flyting has been dismissed by Greg Walker as an instance of him “wasting his pyrotechnic invective on a courtier with no proven academic or literary ability” in a contest notable for its “essential triviality”, thereby revealing “the opinion held of Skelton by the King at whose ‘commaundment’ it was instigated”. In contrast, Ian A. Gordon thinks Skelton’s flyting poems “reveal a man who is highly favoured by his monarch” and, to my mind, Henry’s “commaundment” seems to bestow

²⁰⁵ Ernest W. Dormer, Gray of Reading, a Sixteenth-Century Controversialist and Ballad-Writer (Reading: Bradley, 1923), p.33 and St. Onge (1966), p.33.