I

I diosyncrasy and individuality are characteristic of the work of Skelton: his pride and his obsessive need for self-advertisement make him practically incapable of imitating others at all closely. And his poems often have a highly particularized and personalized dimension: contemporary political events prompted many of them, and some apparently came into being because of specific incidents in his own life. As a consequence of this perhaps, that which is traditional in his work is too often obscured or overlooked entirely.

Ware the Hauke, it seems to me, offers a striking example of this. Skelton tells the reader that the poem was written in reproof of ‘a lewde curate’, ‘A parson benyfyced’ (35-6) who let his hawks fly in the ‘church of Dys’ (42).¹ The incident took place ‘On Saynt Johnn decollacyon’ (i.e. 29 August) at about the time for vespers (100-2). No year is mentioned, but the poem must date from the period 1503-12, when Skelton was resident at Diss (Norfolk); Robert Kinsman and Theodore Yonge suggest ‘perhaps before 29 August 1505’.² And, such is the appearance of circumstantiality that the poem gives, that scholars have been assiduous in attempting to elucidate those areas of it where Skelton is less than plain. For example, he writes that

The church dores were sparred,
Fast boltyd and barryd,
Yet with a prety gyn
I fortuned to come in
Thys rebell to behold …

(91-5)

William Nelson suggested an explanation of the ‘prety gyn’ based on the unusual construction of St Mary's, Diss:

The western tower stands apart from the rest of the edifice, and is connected with it only by a hollow arch. From the space beneath this arch, one door leads into the church and another into the tower. In Skelton's day, if the church door were bolted, one might have entered and climbed the tower, passed through the arch, and descended by a small door (now blocked up) into the nave of the church.³

What is more, though Skelton says that the hawking cleric shall be ‘nameless’ (38), most scholars have seen in the concluding lines on the ‘Masyd, wytles, smery smyth’ (331) an allusion to his name: William Nelson suggested a John Smyth of Diss;⁴ but, if anything, H. L. R. Edwards's candidate, John Smith, rector of East Wretham (about fifteen miles from Diss), looks more likely.⁵

Investigations of this sort are entirely proper and necessary: other poems written during the period 1503-12 deal with people who can be identified from the contemporary records. But these poems, nevertheless, are very traditional—a mock elegy on the death of Jane Scrope's pet sparrow, and mock epitaphs on John Clarke and Adam Uddersall.⁶ The argument that this paper offers is that, although the incident which Skelton describes in Ware the Hauke may have been a particular and specific one, the literary treatment of it is highly traditional, and that the poem uses conventions and motifs which had appeared earlier in mediaeval satires on hunting clerics.

II

There was, throughout the mediaeval period, a way in which a cleric could respectably, and even admirably, be seen as a hunter and his function as hunting; but the hunting is of an allegorical or a metaphorical kind. A text from Jeremiah xvi.16 provided the basis for this idea: ‘Ecce ego mittam piscatores multos dicit Dominus, & piscabuntur eos: & post haec mittam eis multos venatores, & venabuntur eos de omni monte, & de omni colle, & de cavernis petrarum.’ In the standard interpretation of this passage ‘true Christian prelates’ were equated with hunters of men's souls.⁷ Perhaps because of a conflation of the passage from Jeremiah with the ‘fishers of men’ texts from Matthew iv.19 and Mark i.17, Orm recommends the apostles Philip, Andrew and Simon,

To spellenn alle lede,
& hunntenn affterr sawless swa
Wiþþ haliȝ lare & bisne,
To turrnenn hemm till Chrisstenndom
All fra þe defless walde …(8)

Henry of Lancaster uses the metaphor in relation to a father-confessor, who is a hunter in that he finds and destroys vices and a game warden in that he protects virtues:

La veneour ou le forester, c'est mon confessour qi chacee si com veneour lez pecchés hors de moi, et sicom forester ou parker garde sa baille out tout son poair et destruit tout vermyne, ensi fait le prodhomme qi mette tout sa peyne a moi garder en bons vertues et en chacer toutez males vices.⁹

According to the Gesta Romanorum Christ is a great huntsman, ‘þe whiche ouer al other lovithe huntyng of soules’.¹⁰ As long as clerical hunting remained on this allegorical or metaphorical level it was permissible,¹¹ but if a cleric hunted literally he was likely to incur disapproval: according to Orm, clerics should ‘… hunntenn … affterr men wiþþ spelles’, but emphatically not ‘… wiþþ hundess affterr der’.¹²

But clerics did in actuality hunt, and the hunting cleric was a familiar figure. Indeed, some became distinctly well known for their skill. The pious and agreeable William de Clowne, Abbot of Leicester between 1345 and 1378, was the most famous hunter of hares in England: each year he organized a hare hunt for Edward III and nobles such as John of Gaunt, and in 1363 he entertained King Peter of Cyprus.¹³ Significantly, however, he excused himself by saying that he hunted only to obtain favour at court: ‘Ipse tamen saepius voluit asserere in secretis, se non delectasse in hujusmodi frivolis venationibus nisi solum pro obsequiis dominis regni praestandis, et affabilitate eorum captanda et gratiam in suis negotiis adipscenda.’¹⁴ Not surprisingly, most hunting clerics are thoroughly disapproved of by their superiors, and the visitation records of English bishops are full of complaints. In the latter part of the thirteenth century William Wickwane notes that the canons of Newburgh and Cartmel have been hunting and that those of Bridlington have been keeping horses and hounds.¹⁵ Richard Swinfield complains in 1286 that Reading is in a bad way: the liturgy has been curtailed; the prior scandalizes the district by his promiscuous incontinence and entertains a household of boon companions with whom he hunts in the woods ‘cum canibus, avibus, et personis inhonestis indifferenter venacionem salutosam exercuit et clamosam’.¹⁶ According to John de Grandisson, in 1348 at Totnes a weak and worldly prior is allowing his relatives to live in the priory and to bring their horses, hounds and hawks.¹⁷ At his visitation of Selborne Abbey in 1387 William of Wykeham finds the monks excessively worldly: they indulge in rich food and costly clothing; they keep hounds for hunting.¹⁸ At Wymondham in 1492, ‘the office was ill celebrated, the monks kept neither cloister nor refectory, but hunted and hawked’.¹⁹ In 1514 at Walsingham, it is reported that there is ‘hunting and hawking by day and revelling by night’.²⁰ And there is clear evidence of resentment by some clerics that their sporting activities are made the subject of criticism. It is reported in 1530, for example, of Dan Thomas Wytney of Dorchester, near Oxford, that ‘… Quottidie vagatur ad venandum, piscandum … et est indoctus, verbosus, et nimium jurans ac ter aut quater paratus fuit ad pugnandum cum priore.’²¹ The unrepentantly aggressive behaviour of the unnamed cleric towards Skelton in Ware the Hauke was, in actual circumstances, clearly not without parallel.

These criticisms are stated in fairly general terms: in the summary shorthand of the visitation documents, for a cleric to hunt is, in the minds of these writers, axiomatically reprehensible. And in documents of a literary or quasiliterary sort this general attitude is also in evidence: a common and repeated human failing came to be dealt with again and again in conventional literary terms.

In sermons, criticism of clerical hunters is practically a commonplace. Usually it appears in the context of more generalized diatribes against the worldliness of the clergy, as in Thomas Wimbledon's famous sermon preached at Paul's Cross in 1388. Here, along with strictures against the splendid buildings prelates construct for themselves, against their ornately decorated chambers and their statuary and paintings, comes a complaint about clerical spending on ‘fatte palfreies … houndes … hawkes’.²² In satirical verses, particularly those dealing generally with the vices of the different orders of society, or more especially with the shortcomings of the clergy, the charge appears with great frequency. In De Diversis Ordinibus Hominum, Walter Map specifically accuses rectors of withholding Christ's patrimony in order to finance their sporting activities: ‘nomen habent clerici, sed sunt venatores’.²³ Gilles li Muisis concentrates on monks: the abbot who likes to ride out is criticized, as is the cellarer who is interested in falconry; what is more, those who are promoted, he says, are often not the best men but

… les gentieus gens qui vont cachier a bisses;
Si laiscent les moustiers et querent leurs delices.(24)

In The Simonie, one of the most compendious catalogues of the shortcomings of the clergy to come from the early fourteenth century, ‘abbotes and priours’ who ‘riden wid hauk and hound’ are criticized, as are country parsons.²⁵ In Piers Plowman, Reson suggests that bishops should give up their horses to help house beggars, and ‘Here haukes and her houndes’ to help the poor in religious orders (B.iv.124-5), and Langland makes a similar attack on Parson Sloth, who is a hunter of hares (B.v.424).²⁶ Perhaps unsurprisingly in view of this traditional form of satire, Chaucer's monk had ‘many a deyntee hors’ in his stable, ‘Grehoundes … as swift as fowel in flight’, and his whole pleasure was ‘of prikyng and of huntyng for the hare’ (A 165-92).²⁷ Gower, likewise, in Mirour de l'Omme, mentions the falcons and hawks monks keep for taking river fowl, the dogs and the big, handsome horses used for hunting (21044-8).²⁸ Of course, Lollards and their supporters make much of such criticisms. One reformer says of the secular clergy: ‘Thei taken here worldly myrthe, haukynge & huntynge & othere vanytes doynge …’²⁹

There is nothing essentially unorthodox in Skelton's religious attitudes: indeed, on various occasions he was active in countering heresy.³⁰ Characteristically, he is strenuously conservative and orthodox. But, to unorthodox and orthodox alike this tradition of criticism of clerical hunters was available, and Ware the Hauke is based upon it: the ‘nameless’ parson takes his place in a long line of similar transgressors. But Skelton's dependence is not only general: most of the precise criticisms he makes are also based on the tradition.

III

Skelton's principal objections to the ‘nameless’ parson's activities, like those of most polemicists concerned with the problem, have to do with the fact that hunting and hawking were forbidden to clerics by law, though the way in which the law related to the cleric with a penchant for hunting was complex. That the secular power sometimes insisted on restrictions is clear from the re-enactment of the laws of pseudo-Cnut, one clause of which seeks to defend royal hunting rights against both religious and lay transgressors:

Episcopi, abbates, et barones mei non calumniabuntur pro uenatione, si non regales feras occiderint, et si regales, restabunt rei regi pro libito suo, sine certa emendatione.³¹

Here the clergy are treated in the same way as the laity: hunting is not absolutely forbidden them, but their scope is restricted. In 1189 Henry II reserved the right to have clerics tried in secular courts if they had transgressed against the forest laws, and, in a statute of 1389/90, Richard II forbade the ownership of dogs, ferrets and equipment for hunting to clerics with incomes of less than £10 a year.³²

But, usually, hunting was expressly forbidden for clerics, without exception: texts relating to Nimrod (Genesis x.9) and Esau (Genesis xxv.27) were used to substantiate this position. In the Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 201 version of the tenth-century Canons of Edgar, usually attributed to Wulfstan, there appears the following: ‘And we laereð þaet preost ne beo hunta ne hafecere ne taeflere ac pleȝe on his bocum swa his hade ȝebirað.’³³ The London, British Library, MS Junius 121 version adds another canon setting out the punishments for transgressions.³⁴ These injunctions doubtless had some relevance in England. But more comprehensive and influential was Gratian's Decretum, where, in distinctio 86, pars v, appear six canons against hunting and hunters. In capitula viii-x, as Rudolph Willard puts it, ‘The hunter envisaged … is not our familiar traverser of wood and field, who goes out after game under the necessity of providing food; he is rather the public entertainer in the arena, engaging in sensational combat with wild animals …’ In these canons venator means something like ‘a fighter of beasts’, who is to be classed with charioteers, actors and prostitutes.³⁵ In capitulum xi, however, the word bears its more usual meaning:

Cap. xi: Esau venator est, quoniam peccator est. Et penitus non invenimus in Scripturis sanctis sanctum aliquem venatorem: piscatores invenimus sanctos.

This—the famous ‘Esau canon’—and the two capitula which follow and develop it, represent patristic opinion rather than legislation. But in distinctio 34, pars i, come three capitula which amount to injunctions. The first is a letter from Pope Nicholas I to Adalwin, Archbishop of Salzburg, on the matter of reprimanding Lanfred who, c. 865, was apparently giving too much attention to a young girl and to hunting. If he is not prepared to give up both, writes the Pope, ‘… a vestro collegio excommunicatus abscedat. Quod si in hoc contumax adhuc apparuerit, a ministerio cessare debebit.’ Two other canons, inserted as paleae, follow:

Cap. ii: Episcopum, presbyterum aut diaconum canes ad venandum, aut accipiteres, aut huiusmodi res habere non licet. Quod si quis talium personarum in hac voluptate sæpius detentus fuerit, si episcopus est, tribus mensibus a communione suspendatur; si presbyter, duobus; diaconus vel ab omni officio et communione suspendatur.

Cap. iii: Omnibus servis Dei venationes et silvaticas vagationes cum canibus, et ut accipitres aut falcones habeant interdicimus.

And at the Lateran Council of 1215 all clerics were told not to keep dogs and falcons, and were utterly forbidden to hunt or fowl.³⁶

Writers, of course, were conscious of this body of lay and ecclesiastical legislation, and it influenced their ways of criticizing clerics who were hunters. Robert Mannyng of Brunne has it in mind when he speaks of those who delight ‘yn horssys, haukes, or yn houndys’: it is all right for high ranking seculars, he says, because it is a way of avoiding ‘ydelnesse’, but ‘ȝyf þou clerk auaunced be’ such sport ‘ys nat graunted to þe’.³⁷ The anonymous author of The Simonie says that ‘abbotes and priours don aȝein her rihtes’ if they ‘riden wid hauk and hound’ (121-2). In his portrait of the Monk, Chaucer mentions the ‘many a deyntee hors’ he kept, his ‘Grehoundes … as swift as fowel in flight’, and his penchant for ‘huntyng for the hare’, but says also:

He yaf nat of that text a pulled hen,
That seith that hunters ben nat hooly men

(A 177-8)

—alluding presumably to Genesis xxv.27, the ‘Esau canon’ and patristic legislation relating to this whole question. So Skelton has many literary precedents when he invokes canon law in relation to his ‘nameless’ cleric. He characterizes the priest's hunting as an ‘opyn cryme’ (143). Some lines earlier he asks ironically:

Or els is thys Goddis law,
Decrees or decretals
Or holy sinodals,
Or els provincyals,
Thus within the wals
Of holy church to deale …

(130-5)

Here clearly he alludes to canon law, the books in which it was set out and those church assemblies which had the responsibility for administering and interpreting it. And a few lines later he describes the failure of ecclesiastical officials to apply the available legislation to punish the transgressors as a trivializing of the ‘spyrytuall law’ (156).

IV

The Bible, the corpus of canon law and interpretations of these authorities obviously lie behind much of the criticism of clerical hunters. But the criticisms are based on other criteria too which were well established by the time Skelton wrote on his ‘nameles’ transgressor.

The most important of these was that hunting by clerics was a sign of worldliness, and thus something to be deplored. Chaucer says of his Monk that he ‘leet olde thynges pace’ and ‘heeld after the newe world’, and that ‘therfore he was a prikasour aright’ (A 175-89). But he was not the only one. As the author of the Gesta Romanorum says, ‘ther bethe mony men of holychirche, that havithe cure of sowles, goþe to the feyris, vmprofitable siȝtis, as tavernys, wrestlynges, huntynges, and swich vanyteys of þe worlde …’.³⁸ The Lollard author of The Office of Curates says much the same thing about those who have cure of souls: ‘… þei taken here worldly myrþe, haukynge & huntynge & oþere vanytes doynge, & suffren wolvys of helle stranglen mennus soulis bi many cursed synnes …’.³⁹ And another Lollard makes the same criticism of rectors who ‘goo on haukynge & huntyng & serue in lordis courtis, in worldly offices, & þe deuyl drawiþ wiþ his helpis alle þat he may to helle & þis is clepid mercy & charite …’.⁴⁰ The author of The Simonie criticizes ‘abbotes and priours’:

Hii riden wid hauk and hound, & contrefeten knihtes;
Hii sholde leve swiche pride, & ben religious …

(122-3)

The phrase ‘contrefeten knihtes’ alludes to another dimension of this type of criticism—the idea that clerics who hunt are behaving in a way more appropriate to those of other ranks of society. Langland criticized ‘bothe monkes and chanons’ who

… priked aboute on palfraies fro places to maneres,
An hepe of houndes at hus ers as he a lord were.

(C.v.156-60)

In the Complaint of the Ploughman, amongst other charges against the pride and worldliness of the monks, the Griffon mentions that they ride on coursers ‘as a knight / with hauke and with hounds eke’.⁴¹ The corollary to this charge was often that the clergy misappropriated the Church's patrimony in order to finance their sporting activities. The Lollard author of Why Poor Priests Have No Benefice makes the point about officials and deans: ‘… hereby þei maken large kechenes, holden fatte hors & houndis & strompetis gaiely arraied, & suffren pore men to sterue for myschief …’.⁴² The author of The Simonie levels similar charges at parsons:

And whan he hath i-gadered markes and poundes,
He priketh out of toune wid haukes and wid houndes
Into a straunge contre, and halt a wenche in cracche;
And wel is hire that first may swich a parsoun kacche in londe.
And thus theih serven the chapele, and laten the churche stonde.

(73-8)

Another Lollard attributes these faults to curates: ‘But now þe more þat a curat haþ of pore mennys goddes, þe more comunly he wastiþ in costy fedynge of hounds & hawkis, & suffre pore men haue grete defaute of mete & drynk & cloiþ …’⁴³

More serious than any of these matters, however, was the neglect of clerical duties, which was, by all accounts, a frequent result of a worldly preoccupation with hunting. William of Pagula, in his famous and influential Oculus Sacerdotis, criticizes those clerics who are ‘… slow to investigate the faults of their parishioners, ready to track the footprints of hares or some other wild beast, swifter to collect dogs than summon the poor’.⁴⁴ Bromyard makes a similar point: ‘Nonnulli nam que illorum libentius ducunt canes et falcones ad venationem quam christianos ad devotionem.’⁴⁵ So too does an anonymous sermonist, who complains first of all: ‘Sleuthe maketh a man of holy churche yvel seye his servyce and here howrys …’, and goes on to explain that such clerics ‘… in the morwetyde syncopyth here wordes’ and have ‘lytel contemplacioun and devocioun in here servyce-seyenge’ because they are ‘more entendynge to hawkynge and to huntyng and wrastlynge and to daunsynge and to waste here tyme amys …’.⁴⁶ And for some clerics hunting became a substitute for religion. Gower, in Mirour de l'Omme, lists among the sins of ‘folz curetz’ that

… il se prent a venerie,
Quant duist chanter sa letanie,
Au bois le goupil heura.

(20314-16)

The same point is more interestingly and forcefully made, however, in a passage from the Vox Clamantis, where the unholy rector's hunting becomes his devotions: his dogs (canes) are cantors (cantores), and their barking is a church bell.

Vix sibi festa dies sacra vel iuiunia follunt,
Quin nemus in canibus circuit ipse suis:
Clamor in ore canum, dum vociferantur in vnum,
Est sibi campana, psallitur vnde deo.
Stat sibi missa breuis, deuocio longaque campis,
Quo sibi cantores deputat esse canes:
Sic lepus et vulpis sunt quos magis ipse requirit;
Dum sonat ore deum, stat sibi mente lepus.

(iii.1505-12)

In an earlier example Nigel de Longchamp had exploited the similarity between canis (= dog) and canon (= rule):

Silvarum sancta plusquam loca sancta frequentat,
Latratusque canum canonis pluris habet.(47)

And, on the subject of another cleric, William of Rymington puns on lepus (= hare) and lepra (= leprosy): ‘Curiosius venantur leporem in silva quam lepram in anima.’⁴⁸ Chaucer, more subtly and indirectly, hints at the relation between the Monk's hunting and his devotions when he compares the jingling of his horse's harness with the sound of ‘the chapel belle’ (A 169-71).

Skelton is clearly aware of this dimension of the tradition of satire dealing with hunting clerics, and in one passage he exploits in notably. The most blatant piece of substitution of hunting for clerical duties comes when he has the parson speak of his hawks as if they were participants in the divine service:

Thys fawconer then gan showte,
‘These be my gospellers,
These be my pystyllers,
These be my querysters
To helpe me to synge,
My hawkes to mattens rynge!’.

(119-24)

And there is a return to the idea of identifying the church bell and the hawk's bells later, when Skelton speaks of the parson as ringing ‘a peale / wyth his hawkys bels’ (136-7). And a few lines earlier he makes the point about the parson's misplaced priorities with his own distinctively English pun:

He sayde he wold not let
His houndys for to fet,
To hunte there by lyberte
In the dyspyte of me,
And to halow there the fox.

(106-10)

By ‘there’ he means inside St Mary's, Diss: in that context ‘halow’ might properly be expected to bear the meaning ‘consecrate’ or ‘sanctify’, but in the parson's usage here it rather means ‘shout at dogs in order to urge them on’.

V

Two other areas of Skelton's poem in which he uses the materials of traditional satire require to be addressed. Neither theme figures very prominently in earlier material, but Skelton, with characteristic individuality, makes much of both.

In the first place, that culpable ignorance was often a concomitant of a clerk's attachment to hunting was something very occasionally mentioned: it will be recalled that the pugnacious Dan Thomas Whitney of Dorchester was described as ‘indoctus’. But the theme was established in satirical verse long before Skelton. In a thirteenth-century ‘end of studies’ poem the trainee cleric rejoices that ‘Terminus consumitur’ and looks forward, in the holidays, to hunting and wildfowling:

Ex hoc proponimus          numquam verberari,
In agris appetimus          leporem venari,
Omnia que agimus          omnes aucupari
Et statim volimus          ubicumque placet spatiari.(49)

And that this was not simply a poetic fiction is clear from a criticism of Leicester Abbey in 1518 that ‘the boys of the almonry left their lessons to join the hunt’.⁵⁰ In the later confession of Langland's Parson Sloth a number of moral faults are revealed, one of which has to do with the polarity between skill in hunting and an unlearnedness in the Bible and canon law:

I haue be prest and parsoun passynge thretti wynter,
ȝete can I neither solfe ne synge ne seyntes lyues rede,
But I can fynde in a felde or in a fourlonge an hare,
Better than in beatus vir or in beati omnes
Construe oon clause wel and kenne it to my parochienes.
I can holde louedayes and here a reues rekenynge
Ac in canoun ne in the decretales I can nouȝte rede a lyne.

(B.v.422-8).

Chaucer's Monk is highly indignant at the very thought that he should devote himself to learning:

What sholde he studie and make hymselven wood,
Upon a book in cloystre alwey to poure …

(A 184-5)

—yet he is a very skilled and assiduous hunter. And as soon as the parson of The Simonie has his benefice securely in his possession, and as soon as he has formed an interest in hunting and in womanizing, he ‘rat on the rouwe bible and on other bok / no mo’ (89-90).

Skelton heaps a whole sequence of insults on the hunting cleric in his poem; many of these have to do with his lack of learning. As early as line 8 Skelton speaks of those who ‘playe the daw’ (a proverbial phrase connoting mindless stupidity) by hunting, and the epithet ‘mysadvysed’ appears attributed to this particular parson in line 21. This is followed by ‘lewde’ (35), ‘nothynge welladvysed’ (37), ‘moch more febler brayned’ (82), and a comparison, alluding to the proverb, with ‘a March harum’ (104). At line 128 he is a ‘fon’. And lines 222-330, roughly the last third of the poem, are all about the parson's lack of learning. These lines consist of a ferocious intelligence test, in Latin, which Skelton sets for the hapless cleric. Needless to say the puzzle is not solved, at which more execration for his lack of intelligence follows:

The pekysh parsons brayne
Cowde not rech nor attayne
What the sentence ment,
He sayde, for a crokyd intent,
The wordis were parvertyd …

(225-9)

Without wishing to appear to defend the indefensible, it has to be said that the words are indeed deliberately corrupted and that it was not until 1896, when the redoubtable Henry Bradley set his brains to the problem, that it was at last sorted out.⁵¹

The second matter which needs to be addressed is what was perceived as the indecorousness of hunting for a cleric. It will be recalled that the ‘Esau canon’ asserts that, though there are no holy hunters to be found in the Scriptures, there were holy fishermen (‘piscatores … sanctos’). This is a point made more explicitly elsewhere, as by ælfric:

Na we ne motan huntian, ne hafecaras beon. Ac we motan fixian, and swa us fodan beȝytan. For-þan-þe nan hunta næs næfre haliȝ, ac fisceras wæron, swa swa Petrus wæs, and his broþor Andreas, and oþra ȝehwylce.

(203-5)⁵²

One of the ideas associated with this distinction was that the violent noisiness of hunting was indecorous for a cleric, and that the contemplative quiet of fishing was more suitable (Izaak Walton frequently has Piscator make this point to Venator.)⁵³ In the visitation records for Reading in 1286 one of the derogatory epithets applied to the prior's hunting was ‘clamosam’.⁵⁴ Earlier Raoul, Archbishop of Berry, had admonished those who disrupted the quiet of clerical households by allowing dogs (or women) to be there:

Omnes in commune seniores ecclesiarum laicos monemus ut in domibus sacerdotum, quae mundae et castae, et religiosae debent esse, cum uxoribus vel aliis feminis seu canibus habitare nullatenus præsumunt: quoniam illicitum est eum qui soli Deo servire jubetur luxoriosis verbis atque superfluis implicari tumultibus …⁵⁵

And in a Cluniac code of 1458 indecorous noisiness is associated with other matters such as destruction of property and pollution: the code will allow within the monastery ‘… neither dogs nor puppies, which defile the monasteries, and often times trouble the service of God by their barking, and sometimes tear the church books’.⁵⁶

The most striking literary example of this sort of indecorousness, however, appears in Alexander Barclay's Shyp of Folys (1509), which Skelton certainly knew in Pynson's print—though if the dating of Ware the Hauke proposed by Robert Kinsman and Theodore Yonge is correct it cannot have influenced this poem directly.⁵⁷ In his section ‘Of them that make noyses reherysynges of talys and do other thynges vnlaufull and dishonest in ye chirche of god’ Barclay's first example is of hunters who disturb the services. In the accompanying woodcut a fashionably dressed secular appears, with hawk on wrist and hounds about his feet. The descriptive verse affirms: ‘A fole is he … Whiche goth in the chirche, his houndes hym aboute … A hawke on his fyst.’⁵⁸ By his ‘dyn and cry’, says Barclay, ‘He troublyth them that wolde pray deuoutly’, though it has to be said that no actual hunting takes place in the church. As he develops the subject Barclay presents two characters: one enters with ‘on his fyst a Sparhauke or fawcon / Or els a Cokow’, the other comes in with ‘his houndes at his tayle’. Both trouble the church by their ‘outrage’, and Barclay, in the traditional manner, concentrates on the indecorous noise:

One tyme the hawkys bellys jenglyth hye
Another tyme they flutter with theyr wynges
And nowe the houndes barkynge strykes the skye
Now sounde theyr fete, and nowe the chaynes rynges
They clap with theyr handes, by suche maner thynges
They make of the churche, for theyr hawkes a mewe
And Canell to theyr dogges, which they shall after rewe.

As Barclay continues the section it becomes clear that he regards this sort of behaviour as analogous to ‘Byenges and sellynges’, ‘chattynge and bablynge’, ‘roundynges and vngoodly comonynge’ and the like, activities totally alien to a religious environment. And all of this reduces the reverence and respect which should be given to the church.

This dimension of criticism appears frequently in Skelton's poem, and in a very extreme form; indeed, in many ways it is his main point, for not only does the cleric engage in unfitting activities, but he engages in them within the house of God, inside a consecrated church. As early as lines 11-13 Skelton is speaking of the parson's noisiness: ‘cry unreverent … Wythin the holy church bowndis’. A few lines later comes a ‘hogeous showte and cry’ (48) and ‘horryble othes’ (52) as the falconer seeks to recover his recalcitrant birds. In the confusion of the pursuit, the furnishings of the church are damaged: ‘The hy auter he strypte naked … He shoke downe all the clothys’ (49-51); and a few lines later the ‘offerynge box / Boke, bell and candyll … Cros, staffe, lectryne and banner’ are knocked to the ground. Furthermore, the holy place is defiled by one hawk's droppings (62-3), and the unrepentant parson wishes for a similar recurrence:

                                        … he wysshed withall
That the dowves donge downe myght fall
Into my chalys at mas,
When consecratyd was
The blessyd sacrament.

(182-6)

Worse than this, however, was the blood of the pigeon which ‘ran downe raw / Upon the auter stone’ (58-9) and polluted the church. Referring to Exodus xxix, Skelton brings to bear on the situation a weight of biblical authority: he invokes the historically proper use of sacrifice (‘Sanguis taurorum / Aut sanguis vitulorum’, 170-1) in the house of God for the consecration of priests; the contrast, to the detriment of the parson, is too plain to need emphasis.

A historical dimension is also used for comparison in two other places. First, Skelton compares the parson to a number of notorious destroyers of the church, none of whom was as bad as he was: when the Turks sacked Constantinople in 1453, even they did not ‘let their hawkys fly / In the church of Saynt Sophy’ (213-19). Secondly, the apostates Julianus and Nestorianus, enemies of the Church that they were, never ‘let theyr hawkys fly / Ad ostium tabernaculi’ (301-2). By these historical comparisons Skelton is doubtless inflating the local incident beyond its importance. But it is a measure of his view of the enormity of a transgression which amounts almost to sacrilege:

The church is thus abusyd,
Reproched and pollutyd …

(160-1)

—and he has no faith that ‘correctyon’ will be forthcoming.

The generalizing tendency of Skelton's poem is important. The local incident described in Ware the Hauke is set forth as something which, on a small scale, is a fault of the clergy on a wider plane. Skelton seeks to authenticate what he is saying by asking the reader to look for confirmation ‘In the offycyallys bokys’ (146), but implies that bribery (‘mayden Meed’, 149) caused the matter to be dropped. Certainly, no evidence of this incident has ever been found in the ecclesiastical records. Were such evidence to appear it is possible that it would confirm Skelton's account in all its particular details. If the argument presented above is convincing, however, it may appear also that Skelton shaped this particular experience in terms of traditional satire on hunting clerics.

Notes

1. John Skelton: the Complete English Poems, ed. by John Scattergood (Harmondsworth; New York, 1983), pp. 61-71. All Skelton quotations are from this edition.

2. Robert Kinsman and Theodore Yonge, John Skelton: Canon and Census, Renaissance Society of America, Bibliographies and Indexes, 4 (n.p., 1967), p. 13.

3. William Nelson, John Skelton, Laureate, Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature, 139 (New York, 1939), pp. 104-5, n. 10.

4. Ibid., p. 105, n. 10.

5. H. L. R. Edwards, Skelton: the Life and Times of an Early Tudor Poet (London, 1949), pp. 89-92.

6. See Phyllyp Sparowe and Epitaphe in Skelton, ed. Scattergood, pp. 71-110.

7. See D. W. Robertson, Jr, A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, NJ, 1962), p. 255.

8. Ormulum, ed. by Robert Holt, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1878), ll. 13459-63; see ll. 1347off. for the idea of catching in a net.

9. E. J. Arnould (ed.), Livre des Seyntz Medicines, Anglo-Norman Texts, 2 (Oxford, 1940), p. 111.

10. S. J. H. Herrtage (ed.), Gesta Romanorum, EETS, es, 33 (London, 1879), p. 110.

11. For this aspect of hunting, see particularly Marcelle Thiébaux, The Stag of Love (Ithaca; London, 1974), pp. 71-88.

12. Ormulum, ll. 13467-9.

13. For this man, see particularly Ramona Bressie, ‘A gouvernour wily and wys’, MLN, LIV (1939), 477-90, where de Clowne is proposed as the model for Chaucer's Monk. See further Muriel Bowden, A Commentary on the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (London, 1973), pp. 115-16.

14. Chronicon Henrici Knighton, ed. by J. R. Lumby, 2 vols., Rolls Series, 92 (London, 1889-95), II, 127.

15. Dom David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1948-59), I, 88.

16. Ibid., I, 100.

17. Ibid., I, 103. In 1344 Grandisson also noted that hawks and hounds were being kept at Launceston (ibid., p. 103).

18. See Gilbert White, Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, ed. by F. T. Buckland (London: New York, 1893), Appendix.

19. See Knowles, III, 74.

20. Ibid., III, 75.

21. Ibid., III, 66. See also A. H. Thompson (ed.), Visitations of the Diocese of Lincoln (1517-1531), 3 vols., Lincoln Record Society Publications, 33, 35, 37 (Lincoln, 1940-7), II, 117.

22. See N. H. Owen, ‘Thomas Wimbledon's sermon: “Redde racionem villicacionis tue”’, Mediaeval Studies, XXVIII (1966), 176-97.

23. See Latin Poems Commonly Attributed to Walter Mapes, ed. by Thomas Wright, Camden Society, 16 (London, 1841), p. 232. (This poem is sometimes attributed to Robert Baston.)

24. See Gilles li Muisis, Poésies, ed. by J. M. B. C. Kervyn de Lettenhove, 2 vols. (Louvain, 1882), I, 107. On this author's important treatment of clerical hunters, see Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 221-2.

25. See Thomas Wright (ed.), Political Songs of England, Camden Society (London, 1839), p. 329, ll. 121-2; all quotations are from this edition.

26. Ed. by W. W. Skeat, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1886); all Langland quotations are from this edition.

27. The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. by F. N. Robinson, 2nd edn (Boston, Mass., 1957); all Chaucer quotations are from this edition.

28. The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. by G. C. Macaulay, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1899-1902); all Gower quotations are from this edition.

29. See ‘The office of curates’, in The English Works of Wyclif, ed. by F. D. Matthew, EETS, os, 74 (London, 1880), p. 151.

30. On 4 May 1528 Skelton was present at the abjuration of Thomas Bowgas, a fuller of Colchester, at Bishop Nykke's London residence: see Edwards, p. 303. Also from this year in all probability comes the Replycacion written against Thomas Arthur and Thomas Bilney, two Cambridge heretics.

31. See Felix Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (Halle, 1903), I, 624: he suggests 1185 as an approximate date.

32. See Ralph de Diceto, Opera Historica, ed. by W. Stubbs, 2 vols., Rolls Series, 68 (London, 1876), I, 410, and Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi, ed. by W. Stubbs, 2 vols., Rolls Series, 49 (London, 1867), II, p. clxiii; Statutes of the Realm (1816), II, 65.

33. See Wulfstan's Canons of Edgar, ed. by Roger Fowler, EETS, os, 266 (London, 1972), p. 14, where the canon appears as no. 65.

34. See Fowler, p. 15.

35. Rudolph Willard, ‘Chaucer's “Text that seith that hunters ben nat hooly men”’, Studies in English (Texas University) (1947), 209-51. Much of the information in this paragraph is based on Willard's fine article, where full references and translations of the various canons into Modern English are given. Gratian takes his interpretation of venator=bestiarius from Augustine: see PL, CLXXXVII, col. 408 (c. viii).

36. For a brief but authoritative account of the legislation enacted at this council, and the background to it, see John W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants: the Social Views of Peter the Chanter and his Circle, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1970), I, 226-7.

37. Robert Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, ed. by F. J. Furnivall, EETS, os, 119, 123 (London, 1901-3), p. 208, ll. 3083-94; this corresponds to William of Wadington's Manuel des Pechiez, ll. 3215ff.

38. Gesta Romanorum, p. 158.

39. ‘The office of curates’, in Wyclif, ed. Matthew, p. 151.

40. See ‘Satan and his children’, in Wyclif, ed. Matthew, pp. 212-13.

41. See Political Poems and Songs, ed. by Thomas Wright, 2 vols., Rolls Series, 14 (London, 1859-61) I, 334.

42. See Wyclif, ed. Matthew, p. 249.

43. ‘The office of curates’, ibid., p. 151; and see Coulton, pp. 216-17 for other examples.

44. Quoted from G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1961), p. 279.

45. Summa Predicantium (Nuremberg, 1518), f. 255^v, col. 1.

46. Quoted Owst, p. 278, n. 2 (from London, British Library, MS Harley 2398, f. 27^r).

47. Nigel de Longchamp, Speculum Stultorum, ed. by J. H. Mozley and R. R. Raymo (Berkeley; Los Angeles, 1980), ll. 2795-6; see Mann, pp. 25-7 for a discussion of this and similar puns.

48. Quoted Owst, p. 279.

49. See Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love Lyric, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1968), II, 400-1.

50. Knowles, III, 67.

51. The puzzle involves the reversal of consonants within the syllables of Latin words, and a use of numbers as vowel equivalents. There is another puzzle, using a simple number code, in The Garlande of Laurell, 742-53. For Henry Bradley's solutions, see The Academy, 1 Aug. 1896, p. 83.

52. See Bernhard Fehr, Die Hirtembriefe ælfrices, Bibliothek der angelsächsischen Prosa, 9 (Hamburg, 1914), pp. 140-2.

53. Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler, ed. with an introduction by John Buchan (Oxford, 1935), esp. pp. 49-54.

54. Knowles, I, 100.

55. PL, CXIX, col. 708 (quoted Willard, p. 250).

56. Coulton, p. 216; for other examples, see pp. 508-12.

57. Skelton may, however, have had access to either Sebastian Brant's Narrenschieff (1494) in German, or Locher's Latin translation Stultifera Navis (1497).

58. For the text, see Alexander Barclay, The Shyp of Folys, ed. by T. H. Jamieson, 2 vols. (London, 1874), I, 220-4.