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Forest Law Through the Looking Glass: Distortions of the Forest Charter in the Outlaw Fiction of Late Medieval England

IntroductionEven before Runnymede, forest law seems to have been perceived as a legal category adjacent to mainstream law-some contemporary legal commentary suggests that forest law was perceived as arbitrary, whereas common law was not.1 Literary commentary on the forest laws also emphasized their singularity and difference. Indeed, soon after the Conquest, a complex cocktail of literary parody was born. It harnessed the complexity and perceived illogic of forest law and public protest using a poacher's vocabulary of disobedience, infused with post-Conquest rhetoric against unjust forest law.2 Animals in the chases and forests were often characterized as prestige objects that reflected the status and values of their "owners" and also those who poached them.3 Accordingly, chronicle accounts taking stock of the rule of Norman and Angevin kings seem often to comment on the near absurdity of the monarchs' excessive love for their beasts.4 After the watershed moment of Magna Carta, the already surreal (according to lay understanding) world of forest law became even more polemical and complex. The Carta de Foresta (Forest Charter)-a separate document apparently created because the issues around forest rights seemed too controversial and important to be included in Magna Carta, lest the entire project lose momentum-helped refine and interpret a preexisting system that many perceived as unjust.5 Nevertheless, the popular genre of literary forest law parody was established quickly after the Conquest, and functioned as a ready-made engine for the evolution of parody of the kind that would lead to the late medieval outlaw rhymes, masterworks of absurdist nonsense. Poachers, as well as poets, continued to perceive forest law on the ground as unjust and parodied it in word and action.This Article will provide a brief survey of outlaw narrative as it reflects the perception of forest law in the period following Magna Carta, and, more specifically, the ways in which poets and storytellers used nonsense concepts-remarkably similar to those used by earlier chroniclers to describe Angevin and Norman kings as bestial in their sensibilities and their absurd attachments to their beasts of the chase-to think about the law of the king's forest. Outlaw narrative from the late medieval period in England has the uncanny ability to blend almost seamlessly into real-life practice and protest and vice versa, as Hanawalt, Holt, Pollard, and other historians of outlawry have demonstrated.6 Attacks and trespasses on forests, reserves, and chases (seigneurial forests) intensified in the fourteenth century, as did literary interventions in what seems to have been perceived as a particularly oppressive form of law.7 It is no coincidence that the behaviors described in the literature of outlawry were performed by real-life poachers and protestors.8 This study will draw on genre theory to examine the performance of forest law protest, both literary and real-world.9 There are striking thematic parallels between articles in the Forest Charter, incidents in fictional outlaw narratives, and real-life poaching performances of a kind of genred rhetoric of thought and deed that comments on forest law and specific articles in the Forest Charter. This is a literary study that reads the body of discourse around poaching in these three fields of late medieval activity (law, criminology, and literature) as constituting part of a rhetorical genre. The study uses the term "genre" following Carolyn Miller's theorizing of genre as a form of social action, a recurring, typified situation that individual people can recognize.10 When an individual finds herself within a recognized rhetorical genre, the discourse performed by all participants creates a kind of exigence for the individual to act discursively within it as well, either consciously or subconsciously-i.e., in the genred context of a sporting match, each attendee is more likely to shout and cheer because all other attendees are doing so, and the situation seems to call for it. …