{"id":1868,"date":"2022-10-31T21:01:50","date_gmt":"2022-10-31T21:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/chaucer\/?page_id=1868"},"modified":"2024-02-06T18:28:57","modified_gmt":"2024-02-06T18:28:57","slug":"chaucer-and-cecily-chaumpaigne","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/chaucer\/chaucer-a-biographical-portrait\/chaucer-and-cecily-chaumpaigne\/","title":{"rendered":"Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Cecily
(1873 Headline announcing discovery of Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne Deed<\/em>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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In 1873, Frederick Furnivall, a pioneer of Middle English scholarship, discovered a deed in which Cecily Chaumpaigne released Chaucer \u201cfrom all manner of actions such as they relate to my rape or any other thing or cause\u201d (omnimodas acciones tam de raptu meo tam de aliqua alia re vel causa<\/em>).  Furnivall announced this discovery under the headline \u201cliterary gossip” and made a suggestion, all too familiar even now, that, without other evidence the charge must be \u2018unfounded’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Furnivall
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Furnivall\u2019s account of the medieval law here is nonsense, although it began a pattern of such explanations (see Seal<\/a>). As they became more grounded in fourteenth-century legal procedure, these attempts to dismiss the worst implications of the release tended to focus on the word \u2018raptus\u2019 and the other meanings it might have. Since it is very easy to find the phrase \u2018rapuit and abduxit\u2019 (seized and took) in what have been called \u201cwrits of ravishment\u201d in the fourteenth century law, where the issue seems regularly to be one of marriage choice, it has been easy to say that \u201craptus\u201d in the Chaumpaigne release probably referred to abduction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of the cases of \u201cabduction\u201d referred to in such arguments are, however, instances of the amercement of marriage choice (the transforming of an action into something that must be paid for). That is, the women in these cases seem to have married someone other than the person her father or family intended, and these writs of ravishment were used to ensure that the woman\u2019s chosen husband or his family paid her family for the marriage they had \u201clost\u201d (this construction was necessary because marriage had a monetary value for a woman\u2019s family, at least among those with money for such a purpose). The sheer volume of such cases using these writs does make it right to say that \u2018rapuit\u2019 often referred to abduction in the period. The problem is that none of these cases use the noun \u201craptus\u201d (related to the verb form \u201crapuit\u201d but also distinct from it) and so have no bearing on the Chaumpaigne release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rape belonged to a distinct category of what we must call \u201cwrong\u201d in the fourteenth century law to avoid collapsing meaningful categories. \u201cAbduction\u201d was a trespass, and a lesser wrong that could be punished with a fine. \u201cRape\u201d was a crime or what we would call a \u201cfelony,\u201d a more serious wrong in which punishment would be sought against the person who committed it. In the set of records in which the Chaumpaigne release is found are a host of cases which use the word \u2018raptus\u2019 to refer to cases which are unambiguously rape. These records define \u201craptus\u201d as the act in which a man \u2018laid carnally\u2019 with a woman \u2018against her will\u2019 (concubuit carnaliter contra voluntatem suam<\/em>) (see Cannon<\/a>). And no counterevidence to such cases has yet been discovered (in which a case that is clearly abduction uses the noun \u201craptus\u201d). It has been hard for Chaucer scholarship to take in the implications of these legal facts until very recently. It is only in the last few years, in fact, that Chaucer scholarship has tried to reckon with the consequences of the real possibility that Chaucer was a rapist (see Seal and Sidhu<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of the mysteries surrounding the Chaumpaigne release were recently cleared up by the discovery of two more documents that refer to Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne (see Sobecki and Rogers<\/a> and a very good summary of the issues in the New York Times<\/em><\/a>). \u00a0In one, Chaumpaigne appoints attorneys to defend herself against accusation from her former employer for having left his service to work for Chaucer. In another, that employer, Thomas Staundon, is seen making this accusation in a writ. The Chaumpaigne release relates, then, not to some accusation of a crime, but to a dispute about labor. Staundon and Chaucer could argue over who had the right to employ Chaumpaigne because the dearth of workers in Britain at that time (after a severe famine and the bubonic plague had decimated the population) meant that workers\u2019 movements were heavily regulated.\u00a0 Staundon was seeking redress under what is now called the Statute of Laborers not through the criminal law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mystery of the use of the term \u201craptus\u201d in the Chaumpaigne release remains, however. It is important that Chaumpaigne was an agent in these disputes: that she was issuing releases and that releases were issued to her suggests that she had legal standing and it is still worth asking why this was the case if she was a servant who was in legal jeopardy. Although we now know very much more about the context in which the term \u201craptus\u201d was used by Chaumpaigne, we still do not know why she used such a loaded term. There is still, in short, an uncomfortable ambiguity. That ambiguity itself tells us a lot about the effects Chaumpaigne sought to produce. And it is in the light of these effects that the Chaumpaigne release must still be understood: it will always be a troubling description of a forever-unknowable event.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1873, Frederick Furnivall, a pioneer of Middle English scholarship, discovered a deed in which Cecily Chaumpaigne released Chaucer \u201cfrom all manner of actions such as they relate to my rape or any other thing or cause\u201d (omnimodas acciones tam de raptu meo tam de aliqua alia re vel causa).  Furnivall announced this discovery under […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"parent":822,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1868","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/chaucer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/chaucer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/chaucer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/chaucer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/chaucer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1868"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/chaucer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2078,"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/chaucer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1868\/revisions\/2078"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/chaucer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.krieger.jhu.edu\/chaucer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}