ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a study that provides the first detailed, close textual analysis of the fifteenth-century King and Commoner tradition and its afterlife in early modern street literature. The study has demonstrated the ways in which the fascinating and much undervalued late-medieval texts melded together politically aware and astute anti-noble commoner complaints with the mock kings and upside-down worlds imagined by the medieval carnival festivities. The result is the creation of a distinctly Bakhtinian space, in which commoners show disdain for the aristocracy, command and physically beat the king, crown themselves as carnival kings, and defiantly feast on an excess of food explicitly restricted for the aristocracy. It has also been demonstrated that the early modern period produced an array of King and Commoner ballads and chapbooks that sought to remediate the tradition, producing tales in which any social challenge was expunged.
