"My Nacioun": The Man of Law and the Wife of Bath Write British History

I proposed in my last posting that the narrative trajectory of Fragment I of the Canterbury Tales might be seen as one of increasing nationalization, moving from the globalized, perennially expatriated Knight and his temporally and geographically remote tale to the rooted, here-and-now Englishness of that inimitable trio, the Miller, Reeve, and Cook. The nature and value of this newfound "Englishness" then became the question. Especially given the terms of their opposition with the Knight, it's easy to think of these tellers and their tales as embodying an authentic and unadulterated English identity, the mass popular identity of the third estate as against the internationalized francophone nobility and Latinate clergy. The abrupt termination of the Cook's Tale, however, suggests that such authentic and unadulterated Englishness, if it does exist, is a narrative dead end. The identity presupposed by the Cook's account of "oure citee" (I.4365) can't be sustained - at least not without a better sense of its historical underpinnings. This - an understanding of where the English nation came from and how it gained its current form, as a way of confirming its authenticity in the present - is one of the tasks undertaken in Fragments II and III.

Among (many other) things, both the Man of Law's and the Wife of Bath's tales are explorations of the national and pre-national past. In a way, they synthesize the two kinds of scene-setting in Fragment I, combining English places (for at least a significant part of their action) with distant times. In both stories, though, returning to these distant times troubles and undermines the Englishness of those English places. The hopeful, eternalizing "Whilom" that begins the Miller's and Cook's tales, the comfortable assumption that Oxford or "oure citee," London (itself a Celtic name), were always familiar and folksy English places, even back in once-upon-a-time, becomes considerably less viable after the lawyer and Allison have had their say. 

In the Man of Law's Tale, the ancestral English, when first encountered, "[w]ere payens, and that contree everywhere" (534). That is, the origins of England lie in the "strange nacioun," "the Barbre nacioun" (268, 281), to which Custance fears to be sent and against whom (but also for whom) Chaucer's Knight spends his life fighting. "Northhumberlond" (508), at this point in time, is the equivalent of Syria. Not only are these English pagans, they are pagan conquerors, aggressive subjugators of a country not their own - and a Christian one at that. In one sense, this reminder of the pagan Anglo-Saxon conquest of Christian Britons helps recuperate the past evoked by the Man of Law from a completely alienating alterity: the ancestors of the English may have been pagans, but at least they came to a country that was already, and in a sense primordially and inherently, Christian. But even if pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain was already Christian, it was still British, not English. The glib claims of the Miller or the Cook to timeless possession of their narrative spaces come up cold against this fact. The Man of Law, whose familiarity with legal precedent as far back as William the Conqueror (I.323-324) suggests some investment in national continuity across history (but whose inability or unwillingness to go back further than the Norman Conquest also says something about his national identification), certainly wants to minimize this undermining of the national history as much as possible - hence his description of the divine providence and miraculous nature of Northumberland's conversion to Christianity. But the effect of his story is still to expose the inauthenticity of the contemporary national identity in a deep historical perspective.

The Wife of Bath's Tale demonstrates this inauthenticity even more dramatically. In her telling, "this land" was originally so different as to belong to another order of existence: "fulfild of fayerye" (859). The lusty but prosaic world of the third estate tales in Fragment I, wherein John the Carpenter's belief that Nicholas has been charmed by "elves and...wightes" (3479) is a measure of his stupidity, is of recent and artificial creation, product of a religious conquest/exorcism: "the grete charitee and prayeres / Of lymtours and othere hooly freres.... - This maketh that ther ben no fayeryes" (865-866, 872). The contrast between the mechanisms of conversion in Allison's story and those in the Man of Law's are striking: divinely ordained enlightenment channeled through the passive body of Custance vs. the active assertion of male and clerkly authority, linked structurally and thematically with rape (after the friars have completed their exorcism, no incubi remain to prey on women - except the friars themselves [880]; and the description of the fraternal exorcism leads directly into the description of the bachelor knight's rape). The idea that it took such a sustained and implicitly violent effort to make Britain Christian (the necessary precondition to making it the way it is at Chaucer's time) further undermines the authenticity and purity of that ultimate identity. If the effort of Christianizing was even necessary at all: during her wedding-bed sermon to her husband, the fairy woman refers to "[t]he hye God, on whom that we bileeve" (1178). "Fayerye" Britain, by this account, was Christian (or monotheist, or something) already, an idea that would make its male clerkly transformation into the world in which "ther ben no fayeryes" seem all the more coercive and illegitimate.

The havoc that the Wife of Bath's Tale wreaks with authorized ideas about insular history and national identity is underscored by the knight's horrified reaction to the prospect of marrying the "olde wyf": "Allas, that any of my nacioun / Sholde evere so foule disparaged be!" (1068-1069) "Nacioun," here, has a narrow sense of "family" (closer, etymologically, to the root meaning of "birthplace"), but, as the uses of the word in the Man of Law's Tale testify, it also had a Middle English sense very close to the modern meaning of "nation." Thus, while the knight is specifically revolted to have his high lineage associated with this ugly and low-born woman, he also (as the mouthpiece of late 14th century Englishmen) might be thought of as voicing dismay that his nation is "disparaged" by this revelation of alterity and inauthenticity in its past. The Wife of Bath, of course, is hardly advancing a sober theory of history in her tale, but her irreverent and destabilizing retelling of "th' olde dayes" (that comfortable "whilom" of the Miller and the Cook) speaks to her desire to re-imagine and reconstitute the English national community in the present. She inserts herself into the vision of "oure" country and identity promulgated by the Miller, Reeve, and Cook in part by re-imagining the past on which that vision was predicated.

Thus, building off of the steady nationalization of narrative that took place over the course of Fragment I, Fragments II and III explore the historical foundations and justifications of the nation that emerges, and find those foundations to be shallow and unsteady. The Man of Law tells a story of Northumberland's predestined and providential conversion in order to redeem this alterity of the national past and bring it in line with the present, but the Wife of Bath, with a very different view of authority and society, delights in rendering the insular past as different and unfamiliar as possible in order to undercut that authority and that society.