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"Of prikyng and of huntyng for the hare":
General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, I 191
David Scott-Macnab, University of Sydney
Chaucer presents the rebelliousness of his worldly pilgrim-Monk in no uncertain terms. In lines (spoken by Chaucer the Pilgrim) in which the burly daun Piers seems himself to be ranting, we read of his dismissive attitude to the traditional rules of the cloister: "What sholde he studie and make hymselven wood, / . . . Or swynken with his handes, and laboure, / As Austyn bit? . . . / Lat Austyn have his swynk to hym reserved!" (GP 184–88).1 The apparently admiring, assenting narrator proceeds to describe precisely how the Monk's insubordination is manifested, namely, in riding and hunting after hares:
Therfore he was a prikasour aright:
Grehoundes he hadde as swift as fowel in flight;
Of prikyng and of huntyng for the hare
Was al his lust, for no cost wolde he spare.
(GP 189–92)
Besides identifying the Monk as an enthusiastic hare-hunter, these lines have also long been read as pointing to a further waywardness in his character, highlighted by Chaucer's observations that daun Piers "lovede venerie" and that he wore a pin bearing a "love-knotte in the gretter ende" (GP 166, 195–97). For Paull Baum and D. W. Robertson, there is an obvious (and plausible) quibble on venerie as both "hunting" (<OF venerie) and "sexual activity" (<Anglo-Latin veneria), euphemistically "the worship of Venus."2 Robertson also proposes that there is a "slightly obscene suggestion" in the Monk's "prikyng"—a notion that has been accepted by many critics, including Joseph Grennen, for whom "it is a fair surmise that more than one kind of venison fell before this hunter's bow," and Jill Mann, who remarks that "Chaucer's portrait may . . . be hinting at a double motive for the Monk's hunting, if we read the words ‘venerie' and ‘priking' in the light of the ‘love-knotte' on the Monk's pin, and see in them a double entendre."
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