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The Anxiety of Exclusion: Speech, Power, and Chaucer's Manciple Craig E. Bertolet I Scholars have seen Chaucer’s Manciple as a critic of unrestricted tongues and dangerous language, even as a pilgrim who regrets his one speech in the Canterbury Tales.1 In the words of Louise Fradenburg, “Language—its uses and abuses—has seemed to so many critics to be what the tale is ‘about.’” 2 Much of the critical attention to language or speech in the tale has tended to concern the court and the [End Page 183] role of the poet in it. This focus on the court, however, overlooks another important setting where, as Chaucer would have known, speech needed to be guarded: the City of London. Certainly a court poet needed to be very careful about what he or she wrote.3 But London was also a dangerous place for problematic language and incautious speech. Additionally, the Manciple's position as a London servant working in a house of lawyers compounds the potential risks to the person who cannot govern his or her tongue. His behavior and his tale demonstrate an anxiety less about language and aristocratic courts than about the sovereign power that makes the rules governing speech and which excludes individuals from the community when they have transgressed these rules. The Manciple embodies anxiety over public utterance more than any other pilgrim, his tale revealing that his greatest fear is to be excluded or exiled from any company. He would have resided in the City, where lurked reminders of what happened when one's livelihood disappeared or was taken away: London had a large number of beggars, cast-off apprentices, and luckless poor, wretched individuals who had no way out of their poverty except through death.4 To avoid this fate, the Manciple believes he needs to keep his masters happy and himself free from suspicion. Above all, he must not give offense in anything he says lest others more powerful than himself misconstrue his words. As a character associated with litigation and domestic service in the City, Chaucer's Manciple is the pilgrim most qualified to speak about the consequences of crimes of the tongue.5 The Manciple stands in contrast to the talkative Canon's Yeoman, whose entry precedes the Manciple's tale in the Ellesmere order of the Canterbury Tales.6 The Canon's Yeoman talks his way out of the Canon's [End Page 184] service and into membership of the pilgrim company by indicting his master's character. After his prologue and tale, the Canon's Yeoman appears to have no secrets left. This is not the case with the Manciple: both the Host and the narrator hint that the Manciple may be cheating his employers, but he is clever enough to “sette hir aller cappe.”7 Harry Bailly claims to have knowledge of the Manciple's secret in order to silence him when the Manciple rebukes the drunken Cook (IX.69–75). Since the Manciple does not want to make public what he is trying to hide, he overcompensates for any insult he may have given the Cook by offering him wine. His behavior suggests a perception that Harry's warning creates a double standard. Allowing the Canon's Yeoman to reveal all the secrets of his master while warning that the Manciple will have his own secrets revealed, Harry exposes the danger in a community where the speech codes are not exactly clear or are arbitrarily enforced and raises the question of why a sovereign power would sanction one speaker and not another. In response to Harry's comments, the Manciple makes his tale of the crow into a cautionary fable condemning the license Harry gives the Canon's Yeoman. Both the Canon's Yeoman and the Manciple tell tales about servants who know something that will destroy their masters’ reputations. The masters respond to the revelations by abandoning the servants who made them. As a consequence, the crow's future is grim, but for the Canon's Yeoman, abandonment seems a more positive development, as he is now free of the negligent Canon. Nevertheless, the Yeoman's future is potentially difficult also, as he...
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