English Law and the Man of Law’s “Prose” Tale

This essay situates the Man of Law’s Tale and its teller within a dynamic framework of fourteenth-century English jurisprudence and political history, and, by so doing, it casts new light on the problem of why the Man of Law promises to tell his tale in prose but delivers one in verse. More specifically, in what follows, I suggest that this apparent confusion of prose and verse constitutes the most conspicuously literary manifestation of the Man of Law’s carefully honed, precisely practiced, and highly manipulative legal craft: the programmatic cultivation of juridical assent in his audience, so as eventually to elicit a desired verdict from them on the guilt or innocence of an accused party. That accused party is no one in his tale but is instead ultimately the Man of Law himself. His entire performance— including its claimed status as “prose”—is crafted to exonerate him from any blame in the kinds of legal corruption that motivated the dizzying array of antilegal sentiment in the late Middle Ages, which had risen to a terrifying pitch in the still relatively recent Rising of 1381 and which remained at high levels through the rest of the 1380s.¹

To show the way in which literary practice, legal practice, and late medieval English antilegal sentiment all intersect in the Man of Law’s concerted performance, my argument will move through several stages, following the chronology of the Man of Law’s performance in the Canterbury Tales. Examining his appearance in the General Prologue, the introduction to his tale, and the tale itself, this essay will show that he deliberately and serially evokes, gratifies, contradicts, and reinvents the juridical expectations that a fourteenth-century English audience would have for what the common law does and what it should do, toggling back and forth between real law and ideal law, between lamentative descriptions of how law often does work and laudatory normative statements about how it should work.

I structure my argument this way—following the trajectory of the Man of Law’s own performance—because my reading will suggest that the entirety of the second fragment (comprising the Man of Law’s introduction, prologue, tale, and epilogue) belongs together, and should be read as a focused, orchestrated, and highly manipulative performance by the Man of Law. In so doing, I hope to defend the coherence of the second fragment against the frequent scholarly assertion of its incoherence.² At the end, I will steer my analysis back to my initial question about the gesture toward “prose” at the very beginning of the Man’s performance and the way in which that gesture reveals the Man of Law’s savoir faire not only as a lawyer but as a literary worker and exploiter of literary genres, forms, and ideologies.

THE MAN OF LAW IN THE GENERAL PROLOGUE

In the General Prologue, a tension quickly emerges in the Man of Law’s portrayal of himself—a tension that hints at the broader ironies, hypocrisies, and manipulations that will shortly animate the Man of Law’s performance of his tale. First, we learn that he has often been at St. Paul’s (I.310), indicating his prominence as a lawman. The next few lines seem to confirm his prominence and his social power: he informs the pilgrims that he has been a justice in assize, both for his knowledge and his wide reputation (I.309–15), and that “of fees and robes hadde he many oon” (I.317). We then learn that he knows by heart all the cases and judgments of English law since the time of the Conquest, that he knows every statute by heart as well, and that he can write up a case in a way that no one will find fault with. As Carolyn Dinshaw has suggested, the Man of Law is composed, to the very core of his character, by the law and by his legal knowledge.³

And yet, despite his massive legal learning, he reveals a troubling bias toward a particular version of the law, when we learn that “al was...