"Myne by Right": Oath Making and Intent in the Friar's Tale

Abstract

1. INTRODUCTION The swearing of oaths, so prominent in The Friar's Tale, was considered serious business in late medieval England, for oaths carried not only supernatural weight but also contractual significance and legal authority. I agree with H. Marshall Leicester that The Friar's Tale, intensely social tale, is dominated by the unspoken context which surrounds it,(1) but I would suggest that the vows, oath, and pledges permeating the tale testify to the richly evocative, half-spoken context of late medieval commercial, religious, and legal oath making. The utterances of The Friar's Tale range across the entire semantic field to include promissory pledges, religious and sacrilegious oaths, gender and generational slurs, personal insults, and legal covenants. More than just adding colorful detail to the narrative, these expressions provide an index to the cultural scripts informing the tale; in turn, these discourses shape the characters' relationships and motivate the tale's resolution. The conclusion of The Friar's Tale, in which the summoner fails, the widow succeeds, and the demon profits, results from the characters' ability (or inability) to recognize and to negotiate the competing discursive fields of the narrative. The summoner ultimately falls into the demon's power because he fails to recognize that the fluid and contractual nature of an oath he assumes to be fixed and between equals can be superseded by the demon's own obligations to the traditional divine hierarchy. For the most part, critics have seen The Friar's Tale as a theological exemplum,(2) but I believe that in its marginalizing of contractual and legal scripts in favor of an all-encompassing theological language, The Friar's Tale is a reactionary narrative, harnessing the cultural anxieties surrounding the changing social milieu of late fourteenth century England and submerging them in traditional theological discourse.(3) If names a continuity between cultural regimes, institutional expectations, linguistic expressions, physical actions, and the subjects arising within them,(4) then I would like further to suggest that oaths of The Friar's Tale are a sign of the subject's discernment of these cultural options.(5) For example, since the summoner's is set so purely upon accumulating wealth, and he and the demon-bailiff have pledged their mutual allegiance, the summoner is unfazed when the demon reveals his identity, but he is equally shocked when the demon takes him to hell. Therefore, if we conceive of The Friar's Tale to be permeated with overlapping and half spoken discourses of economics, law, and theology, then oaths indicate the trajectory of the subject's along these competing discourses. Thus, oaths convey intent, and although the word has been read primarily as a theological construct, I would suggest a more broadly based analysis of the term is necessary. In fact, intent shifts connotatively along three axes throughout the tale--first as an economic imperative, then as a legal concept, and finally as a theological precept--and this story of a corrupt summoner carried to hell by the power of his own word progresses through three scenes of oath making. First, the language of contract shapes the opening exchange in which the summoner and demon-bailiff swear a promissory vow of brotherhood with the to divide their ill-gotten gains. Second, religious and sacrilegious vows characterize the next scene, for the carter, observed by the summoner and demon, exclaims a series of religious oaths which reveal the carter's normative spirituality and introduces the legal parameters of intent. Finally, the discourse of law frames the last interchange of The Friar's Tale, for the widow, under the threat of extortion, makes a binding pledge upon the summoner in the terms of his initial oath with the demon. At the climax of the narrative, after the widow has pledged both the summoner's body and her pan to hell, the demon bailiff reminds his sworn kinsman, `Now, brother,' quod the devel, `be nat wrooth; / Thy body and this panne been myne by right. …

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