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1882
Volume 36, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 0890-2917
  • E-ISSN: 2031-0242

Abstract

Abstract

twice attempts to justify aristocratic hunting, first on the half-acre, when Piers tell the knight that his duties include defending his hedges against boars and bucks, and his grain against birds, and then again in a new passage in C.9.224-26, which commands knights to protect men, women, and children by hunting wolves. The hunting justifications are unusual. As jealous as they were of their hunting privileges, aristocrats justified it only as practice for martial hardships, and never as serving any common social benefit. For their part, clerics tended to condemn hunting. Not Langland: as he seeks some purpose for knights in his social imaginary, he reframes one of their chief entertainments as generally useful. The C text even intensifies the justification, with its new threat from wolves. The addition, however, sees Langland commanding knights to engage in the one form of hunting that could be considered a duty rather than a pleasure, and, moreover, to hunt an animal that was, by Langland’s day, virtually extinct in England. Overall, ’s hunting justifications tether the utility of hunting, and by extension the utility of knighthood, to an animal too hard to find and too ignoble to be worth the chase.

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2025-12-04

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  • Article Type: Research Article

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