Chaucer the Forester: The Friar's Tale, Forest History, and Officialdom

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.

I

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."⁷

The 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...