The Loneness of the Stalker: Poaching and Subjectivity in The Parlement of the Thre Ages

For the subject willing to take his shot, deer-poaching bears the potential charge of oppositional practice, striking as it does at the symbolic heart of royal power and prestige. As John Manwood puts it in his 1598 digest of forest laws, the hart is "the most noblest, and the most worthiest beast, and taketh the first place" among the objects of "venery"—that medieval art of hunting crucial to the performance of male aristocratic identity.¹ The forest laws of England produce an agonistic space on which the limits of monarchical power are played out, with the aggressive reach of regnal jurisdiction sometimes directly challenged, as with the baronial legislative successes of the Charter of the Forests in 1217 and its confirmation by Edward I (1297), or with the unsuccessful but influential demands of the 1381 rebels for the abolishment of class-based hunting reserves.² With the forest laws having created, in Barbara A. Hanawalt's analysis, the first encounter of English citizens with a "regular police force" on forest patrol, the subculture of poaching seems like a prime venue for a poetics of open and armed resistance to royal power.³ However, the most radical literary threat to this system may well be camouflaged in the person of the anonymous poacher who narrates the late-medieval alliterative dream-vision The Parlement of the Thre Ages.⁴ This lone stalker, who experiences a vision of the Three Ages after killing and concealing a protected deer, emerges as a more unsettling figure than more notorious literary outlaws, with his resolute individuality revealing a rupture in the class hierarchies policing economic activities within and beyond the forests of late-medieval England.

That poaching is not in and of itself an oppositional practice can be seen through examination of two literary hunters of protected deer. Perhaps the most notorious of medieval poachers, Robin Hood stands as a figure of frequent and violent conflict with agents of forest law, such as the sheriff of Nottingham with whom Robin and his men contend in the fifteenth-century A Gest of Robyn Hode.⁵ The Robin Hood of the Gest seems at first to be presenting a direct challenge to royal authority, insofar as he and his outlaw gang, who have been living in the forest by "our kynges dere" [our king's deer] (1505–08), present freshly slain deer to the king himself (1549–68), who is disguised as a monk (1572). However, the actions of Robin and his gang upon recognizing their guest's royal identity reveal the lack of sociopolitical oppositionality in the medieval legend of Robin Hood, whom J. C. Holt has analyzed as a yeoman outlaw of rather limited and local rebellious activity, with modern versions largely responsible for his reputation as a hero of social protest.⁶ The "wylde outlawes" of the Gest prove remarkably tame, kneeling before an Edward of whom they ask "mercy" as soon as they recognize him as "kynge of Englonde" (1637–52). Robin Hood expresses his loyalty to the central authority of forest law administration even before the revelation of Edward's regal identity, when the outlaw is moved by the sign of a royal seal to state, "I love no man in all the worlde / So well as I do my kynge; / Welcume is my lordes seale" (1541–43). Simon Schama memorably expresses the disjunction between the modern stereotype of a Robin Hood warring romantically against the landed elite and the much more self-interested outlaw of medieval literature, arguing that, "this being England, the greenwood generally votes conservative," with the "reversals of rank and sex" in the tales proving "always temporary" and their "sentiments incurably loyal and royal."⁷

The royal co-option of such seemingly rebellious energy can be seen in the story of another poacher, in the fifteenth-century Tale of Ralph the Collier, which tracks the rise to knightly rank of one of the many peasants living by economic exploitation of the forest.⁸Ralph the Collier opens with a collision of the social center and periphery...