“Knowledge of the Files”: Subverting Bureaucratic Legibility in the Franklin’s Tale

From the opening description of the Franklin’s hospitality in the General Prologue to the question posed at the end of the Franklin’s narrative, “Which was the mooste fre?” (V 1622), Chaucer appears to be exploring the issue of generosity in the Franklin’s portrait and tale. This is not surprising. Generosity is also central to the analogue stories in Boccaccio’s Decameron and Filocolo, both possible sources for the Franklin’s narrative, and the public performance of liberality aligns perfectly with the Franklin’s lai. The virtue of magnificence was seen as a sign of status in medieval society, and the romantic genre that the Franklin employs similarly aspires to courtly associations.¹ More specifically, romances often focused on the households comprising these courts. Surveying a number of late medieval English romances, D. Vance Smith states, “the discursive frame of the fourteenth-century English romance takes an economic cast . . . . [I]t is concerned in inextricable ways with matters that are relegated to the household.”² The following essay explores the financial household concerns expressed by and through the Franklin, concerns that allow generosity to occur in the first place. This is a tale attentive to the bureaucratic management of household possessions.

My focus on bureaucracy within the Franklin’s Tale fills a gap in the scholarship. In a recent essay assessing work on Chaucer’s responsibilities as Controller and Clerk of the Works, Jenna Mead notes that there is little historically accurate, sustained attention paid to the influence of Chaucer’s bureaucratic day job on his poetic labors, despite his approximately fourteen-year commitment to administrative duties.³ Noting a “problematic absence of a theorized model of the bureaucrat in medieval governance,” Mead asks, “What might it mean to propose a ‘bureaucratic Chaucer’?”⁴ Accepting Mead’s challenge to envision a bureaucratic Chaucer as the author of the Franklin’s Tale reveals a resistance to bureaucracy in the late Middle Ages. An analysis of the tale’s treatment of bureaucracy suggests that the Franklin is not intent solely on exhibiting the extent of his possessions through the spectacle of generosity. This tale is equally committed to hiding information about wealth. It consistently maintains a level of privacy regarding economic values and calculations that subverts bureaucratic transparency.

Medieval scholarship, which rightly bristles at the assumption that the Middle Ages was characterized by largely homogeneous weltanschauung, should be wary of theories that assign a unity to beliefs about bureaucratic institutions prior to the early modern period. A survey of recent research on premodern administration reveals, however, that the preponderance of historians and literary scholars who work in this area depict a monologic late medieval view of bureaucracy. According to such studies, the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century European populace overwhelmingly accepted, emulated, and appropriated the bureaucratic mechanisms of the period. Given the increase in written documentation during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, scholars concur that such material evidence reveals a growing confidence in, and dependence on, administrative documentation.⁵

Such studies are correct to identify an acceptance of bureaucracy in the late Middle Ages. The fourteenth century was the temporal site for a burgeoning codification of laws and regulations in written form, and it is unique in this respect.⁶ I seek here to complement these arguments by showing that fourteenth-century English subjects both valorized and denigrated bureaucracy. In order to suggest that the Franklin’s Tale opposes certain tenets of bureaucracy, I will not look at the issue of written codification but will instead explore the administrative drive to standardize data, which motivated the recording of acts, decisions, and rules of society.

In his writings on bureaucracy, Max Weber acknowledges the epistemological concerns of administration when he claims that “knowledge of the files” is an important characteristic of a “strictly bureaucratic organization.”⁷ Collecting and organizing data are, according to the Weberian scheme, integral components of what he calls “ideal type bureaucracy.” James C. Scott has recently discussed how this epistemological aspect of bureaucracy requires the standardization of information. In his influential text, Seeing Like a State, Scott writes that regularized data...