The Unkynde Abhomynacions of Chivalric Values: Chaucer s Man of Law s Prologue and Tale

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1 1 The Unkynde Abhomynacions of Chivalric Values: Chaucer s Man of Law s Prologue and Tale One of the major concerns in Chaucer s presentation of the Man of Law is his severe critique of the chivalric tradition. On the one hand, through the Man of Law s conversation with the Host, Chaucer unravels the complex formation of the loyal bonding between the lord and his thanes in a feudal society, and demonstrates the importance of a message that has to be transmitted intact from the lord to his thanes. On the other hand, through the Man of Law s tale, Chaucer intends to expose three dark aspects of the chivalric tradition: (1) hierarchical tyranny of men over women; (2) xenophobia and the brutal suppression of the other; and (3) intimation of incest as a corollary of chivalric ideals. The Man of Law s Tale, by representing an absolutely submissive female figure from the Constance saga, has been generally regarded as a reaffirmation of the traditional hierarchical values. These values guarantee the stability of a society, in which the power structure will not waver (Lindahl 148). Stephen Knight argues that the Man of Law s Tale reflects an aristocratic discontent with the Peasants Revolt. As Lee Patterson observes, Chivalry must be understood as the central form of self-definition by means of which the noble class situated itself within medieval society (178), and the self-definition of the noble class finds its way into the dialogue between the Host and the Man of Law, which contains two important concepts: (1) the meaning of proper, and (2) the social function of woman. Even though the Man of Law disclaims that his tale shall be thrifty (CT. II: 45-46), Harry Bailey the Host nonetheless comments at the end of the tale that it was a thrifty tale for the nones [was a proper tale indeed] (CT. II: 1165). This is perhaps one of the few judgments of the Host s that are un-ironically to the point. According to their understanding, thrifty means proper, which refers to appropriation. The Prologue is partly a translation of Pope Innocent III s De Miseria Humanae Conditionis, which vehemently denounces the wicked results not only of being poor

2 2 but being rich. 1 It is understandable that the Man of Law, who so emphasizes the importance of large fees and unentailed land as the precondition of moral propriety and high social rank, is completely in character to hold forth against the dire condition of poverty, as he quotes from the authority: Yet of the wise man take this sentence: / Alle the dayes of povre men been wikke (CT. II: ), while the Pope s condemnation of the rich is totally and perhaps intentionally ignored. What seems hard to understand is his apodictic advice to the poor. I quote: O hateful harm, condicion of poverte! With thurst, with coold, with hunger so confoundid! To asken help thee shameth in thyn herte; If thou noon aske, with nede artow so woundid That verray nede unwrappeth al thy wounde hid! Maugree thyn heed, thou most for indigence Or stele, or begge, or borwe thy despence! (CT. II: ; my underlines) According to this apodictic advice, no matter they like it or not, the poor must leave aside their sense of shame to steal, to beg, or to borrow money. In order to practice their designated social function properly, women, like the poor, must enter the system of gift exchange, alias marriage, so that on the one hand they do not lose the maydenhede in hir wantownesse, and on the other they are prevented from committing the crime of incest. Constance has been regarded as a piece of commercial product ready to be circulated in the marketing world shaped by patriarchal desires. At the outset of the tale, we find merchants came back to Syria from Rome, bringing with them not only shiploads of merchandise, but also the news about Constance, the daughter of the Emperor of Rome, who syn the world bigan, / To rekene as wel hir goodnesse as 1 See Robert Enzer Lewis, Chaucer s Artistic Use of Pope Innocent III s De Miseria Humane Conditionis in the Man of Law s Prologue and Tale. PMLA 81(1966):

3 3 beautee, / Nas nevere swich another as is shee [since the world began /There never was another such as she] (CT. II: ). This must have been a very successful advertisement, for the Syrian sultan is determined [t]o geten hire [to get her] (CT. II: 230), even at the cost of forsaking his (and his people s) religion. As an instrument of the politico-religious alliance, Constance, the supreme gift of exchange, as the Man of Law perversely insists, must be constantly unwemmed. The easiest access to the sense of unwemmed, as R. A. Shoaf points out, is through the Latin equivalent immaculata, as this term is applied to the Virgin Mary[...] Withouten wem, os son thurgh glas, / And she [Mary] madyn as she was ( n). In an episode where a thief attempted to violate Constance in the ship, we find the Man of Law s uncanny use of this word: Wo was this wrecched womman tho bigon; Hir child cride, and she cride pitously. But blisful Marie heelp hire right anon; For with hir struglyng wel and myghtily The theef fil over bord al sodeynly, And in the see he dreynte for vengeance; And thus hath Crist unwemmed kept Constance. [And therefore Christ has kept Constance immaculate] (CT. II: ; my underlines) The choice of the word unwemmed is uncanny because by this time Constance had married twice, and had a child from the second marriage. It is impossible that the Man of Law forgot this narrative fact, for he mentioned Hir child cride [her child cried] only few lines before. Not only in this episode but throughout the tale hath Crist unwemmed kept Constance [Christ has kept Constance immaculate]. As a matter of fact, Constance has been constantly associated with the Virgin Mary throughout the tale, and the most obvious example is the Pietá iconography, where Constance kneels down on the shore with her son in her arms before their exile from

4 4 Northumbria. 2 Even when the Man of Law recognized that Constance was not at all flawless, he went along to emphasize the uninterrupted mediation in the system of exchange for, as we remember, [h]is purchasyng myghte nat been infect [His purchasing cannot be in question] (CT. II: 320; my emphases), as if the flaws have immediately been purified by the power of catharsis in the Man of Law s narration: A maner Latyn corrupt was hir speche, / But algates therby was she understonde [Latin she spoke, of a corrupted kind, / but all the same she was understood] (CT. II: ). That Constance s Latyn corrupt [corrupted Latin] did not in any way impede people s understanding of her meaning does not necessarily mean that she understands them, and in a broader context, Constance doesn t have to understand them; she is in fact not allowed to reciprocate what happens around her. In his Constance and the World in Chaucer and Gower, Winthrope Wetherbee observes: Though her proper function is as an agent of cultural transformation, she is excluded from ordinary social intercourse and relegated to the status, first, of an object of commerce, then of an essentially 'strange' being who moves through the world as if under a curse, generating social conflict in spite of herself. (85) The mode of Constance s experience, if any, is therefore non-progressive, circular, round a circle back to where everything started, back to what she used to be. To Rome is come this hooly creature, / And fyndeth hire freendes hoole and sounde; / Now is she scaped al hire aventure [To Rome she came, this holy soul / And found her friends again at home and sound; / All her adventures now were safely past] (CT. II: ). Her mission as a media of cultural transformation, political alliance, and religious conversion, once completed, has been reduced to a mere aventure, an accident. What has happened to her is something unexpected, improper, deviating from the natural course. Constance remains constant all the way through. The end and the beginning identify with each other. Nothing changes and everything remains the 2 Dinshaw has provided a list of examples to show the parallel relationships between Constance and the Virgin Mary (109).

5 5 same under the aegis of the dominant narrative strategy of the Man of Law, who as if that he were God controls everything by writing down the large book / Which that men clepe the hevene [large book / And people call the heavens] (CT. II: ). As Carolyn Dinshaw concludes her critique of the Man of Law, Dominant ideology (and its expressed system of laws) controls and manipulates the principle of similarity and difference, analogy and repetition (112). It is perhaps the circularity of the same, which makes George Lyman Kittredge comment that the story of Constance is subdued by its edifying purpose to a consistent impression of melancholy devoutness (16). Melancholy is perhaps too mild an expression if we consider the dire consequences caused by this devout woman. Constance is almost the plague incarnate. During her journey, no matter where she goes, bloody slaughter trails behind her footsteps. Let s think of her journey according to the narrative chronology: (1) at the wedding feast, all the Christians are brutally massacred ( hacked into pieces ), including the Syrian sultan and his followers, who have been just converted from Islam to Christianity, and a delegacy of Roman Christians; (2) Constance is put on exile in a rudderless vessel, and she drifts to the pagan country of Northumbria. Soon after the wife of the Constable is converted to Christianity, she was relentlessly murdered (her throat is cut open) by a knight, who intends to impute the crime to Constance; (3) the treacherous knight is struck dead by a miraculous hand popping out from nowhere, and his eyes burst from their sockets in his face ; (4) King Alla of Northumbria His mooder slow that may men pleynly rede / For that she traitour was to hire ligeance [decree[s] his mother should be killed [ ] / For false allegiance, treason and dishonor] (CT.II: ), in fact, for what she has done to Constance; (5) a thief intends to violate Constance on her vessel, and during the struggle, he is pushed overboard and drowned; (6) when the Emperor of Rome learns what the Syrians have done to his daughter, he sends out the army, and literally wipes out all the Syrians, or to put it more specifically, a military genocide of the pagan Syrians: For which this Emperour hath sent anon

6 6 His senatour, with roial ordinance, And othere lordes, God woot, many oon, On Surryens to taken heigh vengeance. They brennen, sleen, and brynge hem to mischance Ful many a day; but shortly this is th ende Homward to Rome they shapen hem to wende. (CT. II ) [To take his vengeance then the Emperor chose A Senator and many another lord All royally appointed, and God knows They took revenge upon that Syrian horde; They smote and burnt and put them to the sword For many a day, then, to be brief, turned home That was the end of it and made for Rome.] At the end, the Christian soldiers triumph over the Muslims and pagans. If we once again look back at all these bloodstained incidents, we will find that they are more or less associated with the conflict between Muslims and Christians. This crusade, if I may say so, reflects a psychological wish-fulfillment of the general public in the fourteenth century England. Even though chivalry in the 14 th century was in decline, more recent scholars like Maurice Keen argue that it remained a vital force in the late medieval world, and Lillian M. Bisson also argues that chivalric ideals still exercised a powerful grip over people s imaginations in Chaucer s England (123). According to G. G. Coulton s observation, the decay of chivalry results from two major causes: one is the end of the real Crusades, and the other more fatal cause is the growing prosperity of the merchant class (191). The hostility between the Christian and the Muslims accumulated by the past Crusades is sharpened by the commercial success of the Muslims in the 14 th century. The most obvious example of the European clashes with the Turks and Muslims is the 1365 attack on Alexandria commemorated in La Prise d Alexandrie by Chaucer s respected contemporary Guillaume de Machaut (Davis 114). The Man of Law s Tale therefore is Chaucer s severe critique of the

7 7 brutal economic exploitation in the name of the Holy War. If we find it difficult to believe that Constance is a blood-thirsty woman crusader, we will find it more difficult to believe that the Christian religion should lay down the theological foundation for the militaristic ethics of the chivalric code; they are essentially two inherently contradictory value systems. The reasons of their integration are far too complex to be discussed in this paper, but one historical fact might help us to understand part of the motivations for the Man of Law to choose to tell a tale about the Constance saga. As Bisson notes, after Constantine s conversion in the fourth century, Christianity began to align[ed] itself with the established power structure and military engagements against adversaries became acceptable (128). It so happens that a daughter of Constantine the Great, who was one of the early Christian saints, is named Constance (Morris 150). The ingrained fear of Christianity toward Islam in the late medieval society is reflected in the writings of the twelfth-century theologian Peter the Venerable. In his account of the geographical dichotomy of Christian West and Muslim East, Peter describes a Christendom penned into one corner of the known world by an Islamic empire encroaching on its borders, occupying the greatest part of Asia, with all of Africa and a part of Spain (Akbari 20). By the imaginary geographical proximity, Peter intensifies the potential threat of the unfamiliar religion to Europe, and regards Islam as an insidious heresy an infectious infiltrator rather than as a less threatening, exterior, infidel religion (Davis 114). We can also find the similar xenophobic defense mechanism in another popular text in the late medieval world, La Fleur des histories de la terre d Orient by the Cicilian Armenian prince Hetoum of Korikos. It is a collection of Eastern travel literature. Even though Asia has been presented by Hetoum as a rich and fertile area of linguistic, ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity, as Glenn Burger points out, Hetoum s descriptions of Islamic forces in Syria [ ] at times draw on the language of Christian vituperation (77). Generally speaking, to the 14 th century medieval world, the Muslims are non-human beings: in one version of Richard Coer de Lyon, altogether seven manuscripts and two

8 8 early printings of the thirteenth/fourteenth/fifteenth century romance, records the putative history of the Third Crusade of Latin Christendom against the Islamic empire of Saladin in the Levant (Heng 135). It is a story of cannibalism performed by the king of England, Richard I; the captive Muslims, like domestic animals, are served as the king s food (Heng ). The most animalistic image that can be applied to the Muslims is of course the image of Satan. According to Jeffrey Burton Russell s observation, in the Middle Ages, the Muslims are always regarded as the servants of Satan, and Muhammad is Satan himself: in many plays the Devil is named Mehmet, Mahound, or another variation of the prophet s name (84). The Muslims are of course created according to Satan s image: A typical Saracen in French epic literature is Agolaffre, whose black skin, misshapen form, long nose, huge ears, and eyes in the back of his head render him more demonic than human. One Saracen leader is called Abisme (Hell); Isembar leads an army of horned monsters bearing great hooks; another Saracen prince rips Christians apart with his great sharp nails. The German version of Song of Roland by Father Konrad is even more explicit. The Muslims are pagans (Heiden) who worship 700 idols (apgoten), of which the chief were Apollo and Muhammad. All the pagans (Muslims) have put themselves under the Devil s power, and he controls them mind and body. Ganelon, the traitor of Charlemagne, is little more than a puppet manipulated by Satan (84). This is exactly the same case when we see the the Man of law s representation of Constance s two mothers-in-law. The devilish image of Constance s two mothers-in-law perfectly matches the expectation of what a Muslim is, or more specifically, what an old Muslim woman is. Let s take a look at the mother of the Syrian sultan: she is the roote of iniquitee [root of iniquity], the serpent depe in helle ybounde [the Serpent bound in Hell] (CT. II:358, 361), and King Alla s mother is literally regarded as the devil: Fy, feendlych spirit, for I dar wel telle, / Thogh thou here walke, thy spirit is in helle! [You are a very fiend and I can tell, / Wherever you are, your spirit is in Hell] (CT. II: ). By showing the antagonism of the two mothers-in-law against Constance, Gillian

9 9 Rudd observes that this Tale may be exemplifying a patriarchal viewpoint, by which good women are protected (or governed) by men, while dominant women are dangerous (119-20), and as we can see, they die a beastly death. John Gardner, in contrast, more openly shows his sympathy with the sultan s mother: [ ] the sultan s mother is a figure of constancy to the only law she knows, a law sent down by God through a messenger as convincing, in the eyes of the sultan s mother at least, as Jesus, and Gardner therefore asks on behalf of Chaucer, By what authority, Chaucer asks, can we determine which of two revealed religions is the right one? (271). To the Man of Law, Christianity is of course the right one. The Man of Law s grief at Constance s departure from Rome to Syria is tantamount to an apocryphal prophecy of a violent breaking of political boundaries (Davis 115): I trowe at Troye, whan Pirrus bark the wal Or Ilion brende, at Thebes the citee, N at Rome, for the harm thurgh Hanybal That Romayns hath venquysshed tymes thre, Nas herd swich tendre wepyng for pitee As in the chambre was for hire departynge. (CT. II: ) [No, not in Troy, when Pyrrhus broke the wall And burnt down Illium, nor in Thebes destroyed, Nor yet in Rome when it was ripe to fall To conquering Hannibal that had thrice enjoyed The victory, was grief so unalloyed As in her chamber when she took her departure.] To maintain the purity of Constance, to guarantee the stability of the noble class, incest, the unnatural abomination ironically becomes the solution. By the end of the tale, right after the death of King Alla, Constance returns to her father, and [t]hey lyven alle, and nevere asonder wende; / Til deeth departeth hem, this lyf they lede [And so they lived in virtue and the giving / Of holy alms, never again to wend / until by death did them part] (CT. II: ). The ritualized marriage avowal, indeed a

10 10 serious performative speech act, boomerangs back to the forbidden topic of the unkynde abhomynacions [unnatural abominations]. This, as I conclude, is Chaucer s severe critique of chivalric values. Works Cited Akbari, Suzanne Conklin From Due East to True North: Orientalism and Orientation. Cohen Bisson, Lillian M Chaucer and the Late Medieval World. New York: St. Martin s P. Brewer, Derek Tradition and Innovation in Chaucer. London: Macmillan. Burger, Glenn Cicilian Armenian Métissage and Hetoum s La Fleur des histoire de la terre d Orient. Cohen Burrow, J. A The Canterbury Tales I: Romance. The Cambridge Chaucer Companion. Ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann. New York: Cambridge UP Coulton, G. G Chaucer and His England. 2 nd ed. London: Bracken. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed The Postcolonial Middle Ages. New York: St. Martin s P. Davis, Kathleen Time Behind the Veil: The Media, the Middle Ages, and Orientalism Now. Cohen Dinshaw, Carolyn Chaucer s Sexual Poetics. Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P. Gardner, John The Poetry of Chaucer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. Hussey, S. S Chaucer: An Introduction. 2 nd ed. New York: Methuen. Kittredge, George Lyman Chaucer and His Poetry. 2 nd ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Knight, Stephen Geoffrey Chaucer. New York: Basil Blackwell. Lindahl, Carl Earnest Games: Folkloric Patterns in the Canterbury Tales. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Morris, William, and Mary Morris Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins. 2 nd ed. New York: Harper Collins.

11 11 Patternson, Lee Chaucer and the Subject of History. London: Routledge. Rudd, Gillian The Complete Critical Guide to Geoffrey Chaucer. New York: Routledge. Severs, J. Burke The Tales of Romance. Companion to Chaucer Studies. Ed. Beryl Rowland. New York: Oxford UP Constance s constancy (purity, Christian piety, etc.) is preserved by the blood of the pagans.

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