“Ful Louder”: Raising the Hue and Cry in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale

Abstract

ABSTRACT In fourteenth-century England, the hue and cry empowered anyone who could make noise with the opportunity to catalyze legal action. This article investigates Chaucer’s deployment of the hue and cry as a narrative device in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. The legal ritual of the hue and cry appears twice in the tale, once during a story of a murdered pilgrim Chauntecleer recounts and again during the tale’s infamous chase scene. While the first instance depicts the hue and cry as it was intended in lawbooks—a tool of order-keeping that functions to summon the appropriate authorities—the second instance represents the hue and cry in practice: a loud, chaotic legal ritual capable of instigating violence, but which also demands recognition of embodied vulnerability before the law.