No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
The recent legislation banning hunting with hounds in England marks the endgame of a pursuit that was once the most popular and prestigious pastime of the English gentry and nobility. The cultural ascent of hunting in the high and late Middle Ages is reflected in a number of related developments that form the background to the particular passages and problems that I would like to examine here.1 The first development is the codification of hunting etiquette, with rules that were both functional and symbolic, and otherwise served the important purpose of distinguishing an initiated elite from the hoi polloi.2 In England the emergence of hunting manuals and the expanding readership for them are indicative of this trend: while the first manuals were in Latin,3 from the thirteenth century onwards Anglo-Norman became the language of choice,4 until finally in the fifteenth century English took over. Possibly the first, and certainly the most compendious Middle English hunting manual is Edward of York's The Master of Game (ca. 1410),5 a translation of Gaston Phébus's Livre de chasse.6 We shall be consulting some of these treatises in due course. The linguistic reflex of the formalization of hunting lore is the growth of a specialized lexicon, the mastery of which seemed no less important to medieval people than practical know-how. According to Henri de Ferrières, author of a combined treatise about hunting and morality, Les Livres du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio (ca. 1375), all things related to the hunt should be done and named properly, "car parolle bien prononchiee procede de science, especiaument puis que la maniere des parolles sont ordenees selon de mestier de venerie"(for words well spoken proceed from understanding, particularly since the manner of words has been ordered in accordance with the art of [End Page 354] venery).7 The literature of entertainment, too, bears witness to the glamor of hunting and to the appreciation (at least within courtly circles) of the finer points of hunting protocol and jargon. Medieval poets such as Gottfried von Strassburg and the Gawain poet gave lovingly technical descriptions of the hunt,8 and hunting provided them with ways of thinking and talking about other aspects of life. A number of treatises of love and morality make sustained use the conceit of a hunt, and there are countless examples of the occasional use of hunting tropes in courtly literature.9 Being outsiders to the ways and words of the hunt in the Middle Ages, modern readers of medieval literature are to some extent victims of these developments: hunting scenes and hunting treatises pose formidable challenges to comprehension; the sense and point of metaphors derived from the hunt may be obscure; even worse, we may not recognize a hunting term when we see one. In this article I want to examine a number of different passages from Middle English texts that present challenges of this kind. My aim is to shed light on these passages by considering them in the light of contemporary hunting manuals, in an attempt to resurrect the context within which specific signs, be they words or horn signals, had life and meaning. There are four discrete sections, each devoted to different passages. In the first section I examine the beginning of the deer drive in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, lines 1133–50;10 my question is: what is going on in this episode and why? In particular, why do the huntsmen blow "þre bare mote" (1142); and what is the meaning of "þay chastysed and charred on chasyng þat went / A hundreth of hunteres" (1143–44)? The latter question may be...
Loading…
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.