Chaucer the Forester:

Abstract

Some time between 1390 and his death in 1400, Chaucer served as a substitute forester in North Petherton, Somerset.1 Although it probably required little more than occasional desk work, and although it was the last and worst-documented of Chaucer's many dalliances with the administrative machinery of late-fourteenth-century England, the position affirms the persistence into the reign of Richard II of the decadent Norman royal forest system.2 While it is uncertain whether art imitated life or vice versa in each case, a number of Chaucer's literary works mention forestry and make use of its specialized vocabulary.3 In the Book of the Duchess, for example, the poet employs a slew of technical terms over the course of Octavian's hunt (344–86).4 The Knight's Yeoman and (as will be shown) the Friar's Tale's devil-yeoman are especially important in the present connection because they are foresters, albeit of a more practical variety than the historical Chaucer. In what follows, it is argued that the Friar's Tale, by a series of dramatic ironies, critiques the royal forest system in which Chaucer was (or was to become) a minor official. The first section outlines fourteenth-century English forest history and its reception in poetry of the period; the second presents a reading of the Friar's Tale, with special attention to the figure of the devil-yeoman and the tale's satire on the royal forest and other administrative systems.As the Crown's economic stranglehold on lands designated “forest” weakened toward the end of the fourteenth century, the English nobles grew bolder in cultivating local protocols for their woodlands, giving rise to a rich hunting culture that would come to symbolize the British leisure class. At the same time, the relaxing of royal forest law drove into the literary mainstream the figure of the tricksy forest outlaw, whose popular cognomen “Robin Hood” was to be the occasion for one of British literature's most successful fantasies.5 In addition to the historical convenience of a forester Chaucer, then, the thirty or so years of his literary career stand at the crossroads of the two great moments in medieval forest history: on the one hand, the final gasps of the Norman forest scheme; on the other, the appropriation of the hunt as an aristocratic prerogative. The convergence of the two moments in the late fourteenth century fostered an imagined English forestland, endlessly refashioned in tales and technical literature, in which the peasant, the outlaw, the forester, and the noble hunter meet and quarrel.6 Chaucer's forests, too, for all that they may seem a shamelessly exploited motif, provide a backdrop to characters who act out “the growing self-consciousness of the romance tradition.”7The last quarter of the fourteenth century witnessed a series of crises in and around the royal forest. As aristocratic as well as popular opposition to the Norman forest system grew keener, Richard and his deputies continued to cede forest rights to the barony in exchange for fealty, a trend that had gained momentum since John first began large-scale strategic disafforestment with his Great Charter of 1215.8 A tacit coalition sprang up between the Crown and the barony with respect to hunting rights, so that by the time of the Peasants' Revolt in 1381, it was the abolition of the hunting privileges of the elite, and not of the royal forest, which formed a part of the rebels' demands.9 On a number of occasions, the political controversy surrounding the Norman forest touched the historical Chaucer. John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster, for whom Chaucer wrote The Book of the Duchess, upon returning from Spain in 1389 found his dukedom split by a fierce dispute between denizens of Yorkshire and his forest officials, over hunting rights in his forests, parks, and chases there.10 In 1390, Chaucer was robbed of his horse and official monies by forest vagabonds at a place in Surrey referred to in court proceedings as “le fowle ok.”11 A third circumstance even more firmly implicates Chaucer in forest history and the history of hunting literature. In assuming the North Petherton forestership, Chaucer substituted for John of Gaunt's nephew, Edward of Norwich, 2nd Duke of York, who would later (ca. 1406–1413) pen medieval England's most ambitious hunting treatise, The Master of Game, a liberal Englishing of Gaston de Foix's Livre de Chasse.12 Nor was Edward unfamiliar with his successor's literary oeuvre. In the prologue to his manual, having humbly laid out the purpose of the work, he produces by way of an epigraph a couplet misremembered from Chaucer's prologue to the Legend of Good Women.13Chaucer's minor role in the decline of the Norman forest administration having been delineated, the forest setting in the Friar's Tale gains a new depth. For even if it was composed before his appointment to Petherton, Chaucer's reworking of the devil-and-advocate fable engages with the contemporary reality of the royal forest bureaucracy that would eventually draw him into its orbit. Neither the vaguely threatening groves of the Knight's Tale, nor the impromptu hunting zone of the Book of the Duchess, nor the flatly wrought “Forestes, parkes ful of wilde deer” (V 1190) imaged forth by the Franklin's Tale's magician, the forest of the Friar's Tale is composed to feel more historical—if less remarkable—to a contemporary audience, because the tale takes aim at foresters as well as summoners. To be sure, Chaucer's “grene-wode shawe” (III 1386) owes much to the romance tradition, but the Friar specifies at the beginning of his tale that the summoner was the wiliest chap “in Engelond” (III 1322), and that the archdeacon who supervised him “was dwellynge in my contree” (III 1301). Furthermore, the Friar's remarks in his Prologue and the Summoner's irate interruptions make clear to the pilgrims that the fable's true target is a flesh-and-blood summoner, opening the door for a second analogy between the Friar's summoner and an historical one. Finally, the use of technical terminology throughout the tale adds to the impression of historicity.14While Chaucer's trajectory in the literary-critical imagination from “court poet” to “city poet” has bypassed the natural world,15 recent scholarship has turned to his bureaucratic obligations more generally,16 and for good reason: the historical Chaucer could have boasted along with the Roman de la Rose's Fals-Semblant that “Trop sai bien mes abiz changier,Prendre l'un e l'autre estrangier:Or sui chevaliers, or sui moines,Or sui prelaz, or sui chanoines,Or sui clers, autre eure sui prestres,Or sui deciples, or sui maistres,Or chastelains, or forestiers;Briement je sui de touz mestiers.”(lines 11187–94)“I know well how to change my guises, pick up one and put down another: now I'm a knight, now I'm a monk, now I'm a prelate, now I'm a canon, now I'm a clerk, at another time I'm a priest, now I'm a disciple, now I'm a master, now a castellan, now a forester; in short, I do all the jobs.”17 In this extensive list of occupations, officials comprise a decided majority. Although, of course, Chaucer did not attain to all of these professions, his work as an esquire, a controller of customs, a clerk of works, a forester, and so on, doubtless contributed to the panoramic view of society famously explored in the frame narrative of the Canterbury Tales. Seven of Chaucer's pilgrims are officials in some capacity (the Friar, the Knight's Yeoman, the Man of Law, the Manciple, the Pardoner, the Reeve, and the Summoner). To some extent, Chaucer's diverse stints as a bureaucrat must have contributed to the timeliness and complexity of the Friar's Tale's satire on corrupt officialdom.18Given the importance of hunting and the royal forest in late-fourteenth-century English political history, it should not be surprising to find two foresters among Chaucer's creations.19 The pride of place granted to the Knight's Yeoman in the General Prologue testifies to a type and a profession indispensable for a complete “compaignye/Of sondry folk” (I 24–25).20 The Yeoman is outfitted with clothing and accoutrements proper to a gamekeeper, a private forester serving a lord. He certainly appears to be ready for whatever the woodlands throw at him. He wears a green coat and hood, and a brooch imprinted with an image of St. Christopher; he carries a bow and a sheaf of peacock arrows, a bracer, a sword, a small shield, a dagger, and a horn with a green shoulder-strap. One is assured that his aptitude is commensurate with his gear: he looks after his arrows “yemanly” (I 106), and “Of wodecraft wel koude he al the usage” (I 110). The apparent approbation with which Chaucer the pilgrim pronounces these earthy words—“yemanly,” “wodecraft”—reflects the new aristocratic associations of venery and forest husbandry. The implication is that only a very well-to-do knight possessed the means to retain a skilled forester to patrol his woodlands and serve as “master of game” on his hunts.21 While describing in his treatise the all-important “undoing” (disembowelment) of the slain deer, Edward of Norwich distinguishes the hunter's competence from that of the “woodman” along similar lines and in almost identical terms: But on þat oþir syde, if þe lorde woll haue þat dere vndone, he þat he byddeth, as byforn is seide, shuld vndone hym þe moste wodmanly and clenly þat he can. And ne wondreth ʒou noght þat I say wodmanly, for it is a point þat longeth to a wodmanes craft; and þough it be wele fittyng to ane hunter for to kunne done it, neuerþelatter it longeth more to wodmancraft þan to hunters. And þerfore, as of þe manere how he shuld be vndo, I passe ouere lyghtly, for þer nys no wodman ne good hunter in Englonde þat þei ne can do it wele inow, and wele bettir þan I can tech hem.22 Thus the byzantine legal infrastructure governing the foresta regis and the forestarii regis, which had reached its zenith with Henry II's 1184 Assize of the Forest, has been transmuted by Chaucer's time into a complex aristocratic craft predicated on a technical protocol. The admirable competency exhibited by the Yeoman is yeomanry itself, the sum of the duties a forester performed for his lord. Chaucer rounds out the description of the Yeoman with the wry observation that “A forster was he, soothly, as I gesse” (I 117), as though it needed saying. The irony detectable in this line demonstrates the fourteenth-century forester's ready recognizability in literature, at least in ideal terms. For if the symbolical tidiness with which the Yeoman makes his entrance is fueled by anxieties about the practical problem of distinguishing between foresters, outlaws, and locals in England's woodlands, Chaucer's portrait shows, at the very least, how a forester ought to appear.Aside from the ominous “frenges blake” that adorn his hat, the devil-yeoman of the Friar's Tale is a perfect miniature of the Knight's Yeoman, right down to his “gay” comportment and his “arwes brighte and kene”: And happed that he saugh bifore hym rydeA gay yeman, under a forest syde.A bowe he bar, and arwes brighte and kene;He hadde upon a courtepy of grene,An hat upon his heed with frenges blake.(III 1379–83) Green trappings are stock symbols of forest-goers, and so they need not indicate any specific connection between the two characters, beyond the typological one explored below.23 While critics have noted the devil's similarity toRobin Hood24 and to a hunter,25 the ensuing conversation between the yeoman and the summoner makes clear that the devil is posing as a “bailly” (official), a fact acknowledged more than once by both characters (III 1396, 1419, 1427–28, etc.). Clad in green and mounted, the demon most closely resembles the type of middling forest official known as a “riding forester.”26 It makes sense that a devil should impersonate an official in a tale devoted to: (1) the proper execution of an office; (2) the temptation to embezzle; (3) lordship and servitude; (4) economies infernal, divine, and human; and (5) “the ultimate justice of the social dispensation.”27 Rather than providing a colorless foil for the summoner's comeuppance, the devil's disguise adds its own specific layers of irony to the tale's moral.28 By dressing the devil as a forester—a departure from all known sources and analogues—Chaucer pits one “bailly” against another, elaborating a critique of administration that subtly reshapes the conceit of the devil-and-advocate fable.The primary ironic effect of the devil's trappings is the implicit comparison of foresters to devils. Read as a forester, the demon takes on the aspect of an official supervising his domain, as he inquires after the summoner's itinerary with perhaps more than friendly interest: “‘Wher rydestow, under this grene-wode shawe?’/Seyde this yeman, ‘Wiltow fer to day?’” (III 1386–87). At the same time, this is also Satan's minister watching for his moment to snatch away a sinner. When the devil lists for the summoner's edification the disguises available to demons (“Somtyme lyk a man, or lyk an ape,/Or lyk an angel kan I ryde or go” [III 1464–65]), he not only intones the superficiality of fleshly existence, but defines the contours of an administrative program.29 The summoner's downfall lies in his inability to pierce the superficial reality by correctly identifying in the forester's garb the signposts of demonhood: the black-fringed hat, the green gear, the residence “fer in the north contree” (III 1413).30 Crucially, both levels of reality represented by the devil-yeoman contain an administrative system (the royal forest and the administration of heaven and hell), and the summoner worsts the green-clad stranger in both of them, to his mortal peril. While attempting to impress a forester, the summoner proves crueler than a devil.Congruent with the irony that the summoner is crueler than a devil is the irony that he is crueler than a forester. Foresters' reputation for abuses of power had its roots in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the heyday of the forest regime in England. In 1279 the denizens of Somerset forest, where Chaucer was to hold his forestership, made so bold as to bring an action against their local forest deputies for official malfeasance.31 The form of their complaint is similar to accounts of corrupt clerical officials in the century to follow, and the Somerset foresters' alleged abuses resemble nothing so much as the Friar's summoner's “purchasyng” (III 1449): they leverage privileges against their own profit, they extort on pain of frivolous litigation, they steal outright. By the fourteenth century, the ponderous machinery of the kingdom-wide Forest Eyre had given way to ad hoc commissions of oyer et terminer and sporadic local “perambulations” to reaffirm the bounds of the forest.32 The rapid decline of the royal forest arrangement (including the desuetude of the forest courts in the early fourteenth century) accounts for the lack of similar formal complaints during Chaucer's lifetime. As the scale of corruption in the forest system shrank along with the royal forest itself toward the end of the fourteenth century, the figure of the corrupt forester hardened into a literary trope. At the same time, many other administrative systems—for example, the ecclesiastical courts that summoners served—were growing in power and complexity. Thus the Friar's Tale juxtaposes an old problem official with a new one, implying an analogy between the two.33The third irony arises from the summoner's incorrect assumption that a forester must be as evil as he himself is. As the Friar explains at the beginning of his tale, the summoner's vices flourish because of his relatively unsupervised position in a bureaucracy (“His maister knew nat alwey what he wan” [III 1345])—superadded to which, one might say, is the personal hatefulness that sends this particular summoner to hell. But the most immediate cause of the summoner's predicament is his overestimation of the forester's corruption. His dumbfounded reply to the devil's revelation of his true identity (“I wende ye were a yeman trewely./Ye han a mannes shap as wel as I” [III 1457–58]) signifies not only ‘I thought you were a young man: a person, like me,’ but also ‘I thought you were a bailiff: you look just like me.’ Under the first interpretation, the summoner is shocked to learn that the stranger is not of this world; but, as critics of the tale often note, his subsequent behavior suggests that he continues to mistake the demon for a mortal. Under the second interpretation, he is shocked to learn that the stranger is not a corrupt official, a partner in crime, as he had presumed. Because the devil-yeoman's account of his infernal duties so closely resembles the stereotype of the corrupt forester, the summoner fails to grasp the superficiality of the disguise. His demonological inquiries reveal that he understands “feend” (III 1448) as an exotic subgenre of the term bailly, and his primary interest in the discussion is to glean “[s]om subtiltee” (III 1420) that he can apply to his own endeavors. The first question he puts to the yeoman (“Han ye a figure thanne determinat/In helle, ther ye been in youre estat?” [III 1459–60]) reveals a mind working to incorporate new information into a familiar system, to subsume demondom in the same estates typology that comprehends summoners and foresters. Later, the devil makes his most explicit threat on the summoner's soul, and the summoner responds with indignation at the prospect of parting ways with his newfound cohort: “For thou shalt, by thyn owene experience,Konne in a chayer rede of this sentenceBet than Virgile, while he was on lyve,Or Dant also. Now lat us ryde blyve,For I wole holde compaignye with theeTil it be so that thou forsake me.”“Nay,” quod this somonour, “that shal nat bityde!I am a yeman, knowen is ful wyde.”(III 1517–24) The summoner's retort communicates his stubborn eagerness to win the forester's allegiance by reiterating his credentials (where yeman equals bailly), and it also encapsulates his habit of confusing the generic with the specific, whereby he manages to mistake the supernatural for the merely natural, invisibilia for visibilia.34 What remains implicit here in the world of the tale, but is made explicit to the reader by the Friar's opening description of the yeoman, is the specific office into which the devil insinuates himself. At a time when the issue of the royal forest administration was very much on the docket, readers would have relished the double irony that the summoner fails to allow for the possibility of a forester less corrupt than he, and then unthinkingly applies to himself a term for a forest official. Chaucer exploits the semantic ambiguity of yeman to point up the summoner's confusion between the forest system and the infernal economy, of which the devil-yeoman is a dutiful intermediary.By means of these three major ironies, the tale pits against one another two incompatible views of officialdom. In order to maximize the contrast, Chaucer casts the devil in an office roughly equivalent to the summoner's in its position within its administrative hierarchy. The specific choice of a forester depends on the changing status of this office in the fourteenth century, and concomitant changes in the literary representation of forestry—the same circumstances that produced Robin Hood, whom Richard Almond and A. J. Pollard identify as a sort of anti-forester.35 Robin Hood represents the exercise of a new type of literary freedom with regard to the forest, triggered by rapid disafforestment and the weakening of forest mandates throughout the fourteenth century. In the Friar's Tale a similar type of freedom is a necessary precondition for the Friar's attack on summoners: To telle his harlotrye I wol nat spare;For we been out of his correccioun.They han of us no jurisdiccioun,Ne nevere shullen, terme of alle hir lyves.(III 1328–31) This is the point that so enrages the Summoner. His interruption (“‘Peter! so been wommen of the styves,’/Quod the Somonour, ‘yput out of oure cure!’” [III 1332–33]) aims not only to requite the Friar's charge of “harlotrye” with slander of his own, but also to confirm the protocol of his profession. By rights, a summoner ought to serve the entirety of his archdeaconry; in practice, “wommen of the styves” and disreputable friars may escape his purview. Where the Friar portrays a system impelled at all levels by greed, the Summoner doubles down his investment in the logic of administration. Through their verbal sparring and their back-to-back tales, the two pilgrims engage in a debate about administration, above and beyond the question of the moral depravity of summoners—on which count, of course, they also differ vehemently.The Summoner continues his defense of officialdom into his own tale. The Summoner's friar is above all a bad administrator who, in his greed, perverts proper bookkeeping (“He planed awey the names everichon/That he biforn had writen in his tables” [III 1758–59]).36 His hypocrisy is supplemented by his “nyfles and … fables” (III 1760), that is, subversions of official protocol—and ineffectual ones at that, for the invalid Thomas sees through the friar's bloviating and plays him a dirty trick. Like a modern citizen exasperated with the Department of Motor Vehicles, Thomas indicts fraternal inefficiency alongside fraternal corruption: “I in fewe yeres,Have spent upon diverse manere freresFul many a pound; yet fare I never the bet.”(III 1949–51) The Summoner's friar is incompetent, where the Friar's summoner is viciously effective. The formal disputation over the dividing of the fart gives the Summoner's friar a taste of his own medicine, lampooning the empty jargon of theology that has usurped the place of expedient bureaucratic language.By bracketing the Friar's tale with arguments over administration, Chaucer sets the stage for the contrast between the avaricious summoner and the scrupulous forester. Although the satire inherent in the demon's disguise smacks of a certain nervous humor about the ambivalent role of the fourteenth-century forest administration, the tale's treatment of the office is ultimately quite mild. The devil's rueful admission that “My wages been ful streite and ful smale.My lord is hard to me and daungerous,And myn office is ful laborous.”(III 1426–28) explains, and perhaps apologizes for, official malfeasance in the forest. Whether or not the apology comes from the poet himself—the Friar's Tale may well have been composed before 1390—the historical Chaucer could hardly have escaped pondering the reputation of the office he held during the last decade of his life. When the devil goes on to inform the summoner that “therfore by extorcions I lyve.For sothe, I take al that men wol me yive.Algate, by sleyghte or by violence,Fro yeer to yeer I wynne al my dispence”(III 1429–32), he simultaneously voices the stereotype of the corrupt forester, and misrepresents his own behavior. As it turns out, the devil will need no “sleyghte” or “violence” to dispose of the summoner's soul. Indeed, in all respects except this very statement, the demon operates with an unsettlingly honest demeanor. His disquisition on demonology (III 1474–1522), not found in any extant analogue of the tale, draws heavily on orthodox theological authorities, and its tone could be described as humble.37 If one is to understand that he has resorted to low means at other times and under other circumstances, nevertheless his brand of corruption pales in comparison with the summoner's depravities. After all, in collecting the soul of an unrepentant sinner, the devil performs an important duty in the divine economy, as he acknowledges: “somtyme we been Goddes instrumentz/And meenes to doon his comandementz” (III 1483–84). Just as the devil's honesty highlights the summoner's depravity by contrast, so too both characters' misapplication of the corrupt forester topos destabilizes the stereotype.Read in the context of forest history and the rise of bureaucracy in England, the summoner's morbid curiosity about demondom recapitulates a growing contemporary fascination with officialdom, making the Friar's Tale a kind of brief speculum officiale. Within the predictable logic of the devil-and-advocate fable, the summoner's inquisitiveness leads to his damnation, while on a metatextual view, it signals a departure from the world of good and evil. As in the tale's sources and analogues, Chaucer's devil does not lower or cackle; his respect for “entente” marks him as an exemplary officer. By casting the devil as a forest official, Chaucer goes one step further than his sources in suggesting an administrative rather than a theological moral for the tale. The devil's double instantiation as demon and yeoman invites a comparison between divine and secular administrations, and if Chaucer seems to suggest, or to have his Friar suggest, that clerical administration by its nature encourages corruption, the obvious irony of selecting the despised royal forest as its well-ordered opposite reveals the outlines of a much more nuanced critique of officialdom. When the devil-yeoman forcibly invites the summoner to “knowen of oure privetee” (III 1637), Chaucer not only makes perfectly clear the Friar's heavy-handed point that it is in the depths of the abyss that “somonours han hir heritage” (III 1641); he also raises for his audience the narrative possibility of embarking on the Dantean journey to hell and back, for a working knowledge of the divine and infernal “privetee” that takes the form of an administration, and in whose image human organization is bound to discover its form.