Vital Property in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

Introduction: Scienter and Vital Property

In Kent in 1385, a knight, Thomas Fogge, sued a clerk, Robert Brigham, because Brigham’s horse kicked Fogge’s pregnant mare, aborting her valuable foals. As plaintiff, Fogge claimed that Brigham’s horse kicked habitually, so Brigham should have prevented his animal’s aggression.¹ Such cases involving wayward, sentient property were tried in the English common-law courts under the action scienter, “knowingly,” a legal principle many US state courts still preserve.² A scienter defendant owed damages if the courts believed he understood his possessions well enough to anticipate their unruliness but insufficiently to make them behave.

Chaucer’s Wife of Bath playfully maps scienter onto marriage. In theory, she must obey her husbands, who rule her as the head rules the body.³ But if she rejects their authority, her misdeeds, like those of Brigham’s horse, can become her masters’ liability.⁴ She compares herself three times to horses like Robert Brigham’s intractable beast (III.386, 602, 655–58).⁵ She characterizes herself, for example, as a willful “hors” that could “byte and whyne” (386) during an argument until her husbands took responsibility for her own “gilt” (387). In comparing herself to a willful, animal chattel, the Wife suggests that having the legal right to claim dominion over other creatures and things may be worth considerably less without help from these legally subjected creatures and things themselves. Husbands and horse owners both enjoy legal dominion and rights to use the bodies of the creatures under their authority—in this case, wives and horses. But wives and horses have agency in this legal relationship as well.

The story of Robert Brigham’s unruly horse and the Wife’s playful allusions to scienter both illustrate the agency of property—things and creatures legally subject to dominion, use, and trade by another—within the law. Yet the familiar term “property” sometimes implies a clear split between human owners and an objectified environment. This sense of property as objectified environment may obscure some of the nuances of what it meant, from a medieval perspective, for a human to claim powers that we now think of as property rights—that is, dominion, rights to use, rights to give away, and rights to trade—over things, animals, or other humans. In other words, it obscures the agency of owned, corporeal things and creatures within the law. It obscures property’s vitality.

This essay explores the Wife’s references to this vital role of property in the laws that govern it. I argue that the Wife works with an existing logic of medieval property law suggested by the opening example of Robert Brigham’s horse. The Wife, along with many medieval legal sources, depicts property, owners, and the law as an ecological family; like husband and wife, and perhaps, more broadly, like family, she and her belongings shape each other dynamically, and property also shapes the abstract laws made to rule it.

In order to make this point about property’s vital role in the law, the Wife deploys an extended series of metaphors in which she compares herself, a sentient, intimate, human participant in the marriage contract, to property. Of course, medieval wives were not property; they were consenting partners in a domestic contract. Yet wives were subject to their husbands’ dominion and use in some ways that resembled a property relation. Hence, the Wife’s series of metaphors comparing spouses and property use her liminal role as, on one hand, a property owner and, on the other, subject to her husbands’ dominion and use, to illuminate property’s agency within the law and its influence over its owners. Even as a wife has agency in marriage and influence over her husband, property too acts within the law and on its owners. Her Prologue and Tale shed light on the vital power of corporeal things and creatures under another’s legal dominion to influence the laws and the human owners that, ostensibly, rule them.

In contrast with this conception of property as a vital...