courtly culture, street culture, St Pauls, litigious, rustic, court, dream, education at the Inns, country, court, social satire

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flyting he argues (probably ingenuously), “Ye passe from your purpose in such vnworthi sorte/ Ye make of your doinges a very laughing sporte” (sig. Cii^r).

The subsequent contribution, ‘Westerne Wyll, vpon the Debate betuyxte Churchyarde and Camell’, also passes commentary upon the flyting, which it associates emphatically with street culture rather than courtly culture. It is a narrative poem in which three mariners visit a book stall at St. Paul’s where the details of the flyting thus far are explained by a printer who reads the dream to them. Again this poem seconds Churchyard, and the poet is perhaps Churchyard himself writing anonymously so as venture into direct social complaint surreptitiously. Dycar, now a well-established emanation of Piers, is described by the printer as: “a thryuing ladde, brought vp in pieres scole./ The plowman stoute, of whom I thynke ye haue full often harde/ A swynckyng swaine, that handleth wel his spade and other toole”, and he is set in contrast to the greedy landlords: He “bragges not of rentes fees ne of entayled landes” (sig. Civ^v).

Again, while social satire is accepted as righteous, flyting is presented as being somewhat suspect. The mariners pick up on the legal jargon (rejoinder, surrejoinder and so forth) used by the protagonists and, rather than interpreting it as a signifier of middle-class education at the Inns, they identify it with the litigious tendencies of scolds or gossips: “it sounded of the lawe, as though somme case it warre/ Of ioyncture right for waywarde wyues, to pleaden at the barre” (sig. Civ^r). They suspect the protagonists of subjecting their betters to crude street flyting, and of effeminacy into the bargain. The printer comes to the defence of Churchyard/Dycar here by recouping the social status of flyting. Again country and court, and social satire and courtly flyting, converge. The printer explains to the mariners that the rustic, Dycar, has a friend at court (Churchyard) who wrote down his dream for him (sig. Dii^v); perhaps an allusion to the friendship between the courtier, Alexis, and Corydon, the rustic, in Virgil’s second eclogue. This, so they learn, is a dispute that has

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