Winner and Waster is a DREAM VISION poem of 503
extant lines, written in a Northwest Midland dialect
of MIDDLE ENGLISH. The poem is a political
ALLEGORY composed during the reign of King EDWARD
III, who appears as a character in the poem.
Its verse form marks it as part of the ALLITERATIVE
REVIVAL popular in the west and north of England
in the 14th century, and as such it is related to
poems like SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, The
ALLITERATIVEMORTE ARTHURE, and particularly The
PARLIAMENT OF THE THREE AGES, with which it has
often been compared. Some scholars have suggested
that the author of Winner and Waster is the
same poet who wrote the Parliament, but most
think the common authorship unlikely. Winner
and Waster survives in a single 15th-century manuscript
in the British Library (Additional MS
31042), which also contains the Parliament of the
Three Ages. But the manuscript is incomplete and
the text faulty in places due to scribal error.
The poem begins with the narrator falling
asleep near the bank of a river in the west country.
In his dream he sees two opposing armies approach
one another on a great plain. One army, led
by Winner, includes the pope and cardinals and a
number of friars, as well as lawyers and merchants.
With Waster, leader of the other host, are the nobility
and the military—knights, squires, and bowmen.
On a hill above the plain is the pavilion of the
king—identified as Edward III by the motto of the
Order of the Garter (“Evil be to him who evil
thinks”). The king sends a great baron (presumably
his son the Black Prince) to forbid the armies
to do battle, and to require their leaders to come
before the king and explain themselves.Winner
and Waster do so in a series of eight speeches alternating
between the two. Thus the text becomes
a DEBATE POEM of the sort popular in the later Middle
Ages.Winner, who represents those who work
to create and to attain wealth, speaks first. He defends
the need for producers of wealth in society,
and condemns those who, like Waster, squander
resources. The figure of Waster in the poem, however,
represents not only profligates, but anyone
who consumes what has been manufactured. Thus
while the laziness and prodigality ofWaster may be
condemned in the poem, so too is the miserliness
and selfishness of Winner. Both groups, though
mortal enemies, are necessary in society. In the end
the king seems to realize this. As in most debate
poems, the argument has no clear victor, and the
king settles the dispute by sending Winner to live
with the pope in Rome (where he is most popular)
and Waster to visit the shops of London, apparently
to stimulate the economy. The
manuscript breaks off before the end of the king’s
speech.
The poem may reflect class struggle between the
bourgeoisie (as “winners”) and the nobility (as
“wasters”) in the economic crisis following the
BLACK DEATH. It also seems influenced by Aristotle’s
view of wastefulness and miserliness as extreme
vices, with ideal moral behavior being the mean,
the courtly virtue of liberality. In either case, the
poet suggests that wise government is needed to
solve the economic problems of society. The poem
may reflect political events after the Black Death,
when the Statute of Laborers (1351) and the Treason
Statute (1352) were enacted to curb societal
unrest, and the poet may be writing to urge the
king to take decisive action to ensure order. However,
the manuscript as we have it was hardly intended
for a courtly audience, since it is interrupted
periodically by a call to drink, as at a tavern. Such
interruptions would be consistent with a MINSTREL
performance for a middle-class audience, and it is
possible that what has survived is a transcription
of a minstrel’s copy of a poem originally intended
for a noble patron. How well known the poem was
in its own day is hard to judge, given the single
manuscript that survives, but some scholars believe
that Winner and Waster was influential on another
Northwest Midland alliterative poem, William
LANGLAND’s PIERS PLOWMAN.
Bibliography
Gardner, John, trans. The Alliterative Morte Arthure,
The Owl and the Nightingale, and Five Other Middle
English Poems. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1971.
Ginsberg,Warren, ed.Wynnere and Wastoure and the
Parlement of the Thre Ages. Kalamazoo, Mich.:
Published for TEAMS by the Medieval Institute,
1992.
Trigg, Stephanie, ed. Wynnere and Wastoure. EETS
297. London: Oxford University Press, 1990.