Abstract
Chaucer’s “Friar’s Tale” condemns summoners for their links to Satan and their avaricious attachment to ephemeral goods. These two threads converge in the scene where the tale summoner urges his companion (a fiend) to seize a cart of hay and horses that were insincerely offered to the fiend by a frustrated carter. This essay examines the significance of Chaucer’s decision to specify hay as the contents of the cart. The Bible and other texts had long used hay as a symbol of ephemerality, materiality, and the sin of avarice, a late efflorescence of which is found in another medium, Bosch’s painting “The Haywain”. The summoner’s willful insistence on taking the cart of hay draws him closer to the very substance that symbolizes his own sinful propensities and secures the certainty of his damnation well before the actual event.
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Notes
In this I agree with Mroczkowski who writes that the “Friar’s Tale” is basically a study in greed (Mroczkowski 1961, 108).
All quotations of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are from Benson (1987).
Not everyone thinks the tale summoner is stupid. Helen Cooper writes, “The summoner is not a fool or a gull, as John the carpenter [in the Miller’s Tale] is. He puts profit way above conscience, and explicitly refuses confession and absolution…. That the chance for repentance is offered him at the end underlines the deliberateness of his choice of sin…in theological terms, his contumaciousness” (Cooper 1996, 172). In light of all the warning signs before him I understand the summoner’s contumacy as evidence of his stupidity.
See “cariage” in Middle English Compendium. Definition 4a gives the following meaning for “upon cariage”: “A feudal service, a tenant’s duty to provide transportation for his lord’s goods; also, a money commutation of this service.” Chaucer uses the word “cariage” only one other time in the Canterbury Tales where, interestingly enough, it appears in the context of the discussion of avarice in the “Parson’s Tale” (X. 752).
Cooper (1996) notes the “repetition of certain words or groups of words. One of the most persistent is the set of verbs connected to extortion and profit: geten, taken, wynnen, pilen” (171).
The old lady twice (III.1623, 1629) mentions sending her “panne” to hell along with the summoner. This indicates her desire to be rid of him at any cost but also links the summoner again to material goods. The fiend also mentions the “panne” (III.1635) when he answers the old lady’s prayer and takes the summoner to hell.
This information is from the Harvard Middle English Glossarial Database found at sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/tools/.
All quotations of the Douay-Rheims Bible are from Challoner (2000).
All quotations of the Wycliffe Bible are from Forshall and Madden (1850). I include extracts from the older version of the Wycliffe Bible because it more consistently uses hay where the Douay-Rheims Bible uses grass.
On Chaucer’s familiarity with the Wycliffe Bible see Fehrman (2007).
Bold italics are in the original.
Quotations of The Prick of Conscience are from Hanna and Wood (2013).
The Whitings’ lists of proverbs are arranged alphabetically and then numerically. The numbers in parentheses are the Whitings’.
A high-resolution image of “The Haywain” (“El carro de heno” in Spanish) may be found at the Prado Museum’s website. https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/obra-de-arte/el-carro-de-heno/7673843a-d2b6-497a-ac80-16242b36c3ce. The Prado Museum dates this painting to 1512–15 although Kolve dates it as early as 1485–90.
For a review of the criticism see Marijnissen (1987).
I rely on Grauls’s French summary for this information (Grauls 1938, 177). A related article by Grauls has this statement about hay: “Un poême moyen-néerlandais datant d’environ 1470, publié par N. de Pauw, et intitulé ‘De la Meule de Foin’, nous montre les biens terrestres sous la forme d’une meule de foin. Au lieu de se partager équitablement ce foin, les hommes se disputent pour s’emparer de la plus grande quantité possible. Déjà en 1470 le foin était donc représenté comme l’objet de la cupidité des hommes.” (Grauls 1939–40) (“A Middle Dutch poem dating from around 1470, published by N. de Pauw, and entitled ‘The Stack of Hay,’ shows us earthly goods in the form of a haystack. Rather than sharing this hay equitably, the people fight over it in order to grab as much as possible. So already in 1470 hay was represented as an object of human avarice.”) The evidence in this paper suggests that the connection between hay and a desire for material goods happened much earlier than 1470.
The tradition of depicting hay in this manner carries on in the sixteenth-century drawing “It is all Hay” by Frans Pourbus the Elder, which depicts a pile of hay surrounded by lay and clerical people who grab hay from it while others are offered hay by diabolic jester-like figures (Haverkamp-Begemann and Logan 1970, Vol. 1, plate 260; Vol. 2, 271–72). A high-resolution image of Pourbus’s drawing is available at http://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/57879.
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Costomiris, R. “A Cart that Charged was with hey”: The Symbolism of Hay in Chaucer’s “Friar’s Tale”. Neophilologus 104, 585–599 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-020-09641-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-020-09641-x