‘When she would have taken her flight, she hung by the legs fast’: Falconry and Bodily Autonomy
By Sara Petrosillo
‘Falconry will break your heart in a hundred ways.’
During my time at a falconry apprentice seminar, the master falconer repeated this mantra through tears as she held the body of a small kestrel to her chest in a futile effort to revive it after it had been attacked by another falconry bird. The tender and fragile bond between falconer and hawk is hard to understand from the outside—it might look like a simple case of human superiority and especially male desire to control the wild. Yet the actual experience of spending so many hours in the company of birds produces men and women whose consciousness is subsumed by that of their avian partners. They see things from the perspective of the bird and bend their own minds and bodies to accommodate this other species. We see evidence of this blended consciousness overtly in medieval falconry manuals and modern accounts of falconry. But there are also small, barely perceptible unguarded moments in premodern literature that imply an unrelenting concern for the body of the bird. These moments provide glimpses into how people thought and talked about bodies and bodily autonomy in the premodern era. I think there are lessons here for us today in an era of increasing fear and doubt about control and autonomy of our human bodies.
Because hawks cannot be domesticated (they naturally fear humans) and they hunt better the less we interfere with them (they need to be released completely in order to catch game), building a relationship with one is quite the challenge. Attempting to convey this delicate balance of control and release, falconry manuals like Frederick II’s On the Art of Hunting with Birds, topped the how-to book charts in the thirteenth century. Immersion in reading about falconry and application of falconry theory to practice caused a shift in the way medieval people thought about control and about bodies. Control became understood as a two-way street; in the end, the falconer was always more devoted to the falcon than the opposite. I have thought through this a lot in a book about control and gender in falconry. But it’s not just the falconer’s desire to harness the hunting prowess of the raptor that I want to think about here. Even as they captured hawks, hooded them, rationed their food, and kept them in the mews, premodern people understood the dangers of the wrong kind of interference and avoided unnecessary controls when they did irrevocable damage to the bird’s body.
This interspecies hyper-sensitivity between bird and human bodies seems to get easily subsumed by the misogyny of falconry tropes used in texts worrying over independent women. Metaphors comparing training falcons to training wives into obedience are all over pre- and early modern literature and art, perhaps none more famous than Petruccio’s method to tame the unruly Kate in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. Withholding food and sleep from his new bride, Petruccio outlines one ‘way [he has] to man [his] haggard, / To make her come and know her keeper’s call’ (Act 4, Scene 1, lines 193-194). Petruccio’s falconry monologue is often omitted from modern performances. Richard Burton doesn’t go there with Elizabeth Taylor in the 1967 Zeffirelli film nor did ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ audiences hear Raul Julia compare Meryl Streep to a falcon in 1978.
These theatrical ommissions show just how distasteful and mystifying modern audiences find using falconry to think through female bodily autonomy. And though most moderns do not have the background in falconry necessary to perceive the nuances of the references, by the time Shakespeare was drawing on falconry as a literary trope, it had indeed taken a more overtly misogynistic tone. However, when we look at unguarded moments that don’t appear interested in policing bodies, we find a true understanding of what happens when training goes wrong—when the instruments meant to keep hawks safe actually do the opposite.
I’m talking about jesses.
The first thing falconers do with hawks in order to keep hold of them is attach short leather anklets crimped with metal grommets through which they thread leather straps called jesses. The next step is the difference between life and death: when they are on their perch, these jesses have short slits through which a leash is tied and affixed to a metal ring so that they can move around in their enclosure, or mews. But when they are flying, these mews jesses are swapped out for flying jesses—shorter and without any opening so they don’t get tangled in tree branches or bushes (see Fig.s 1 and 2).
Fig. 1 - Image of a hawk launching off a glove, smooth jesses trail from the hawk’s ankles
Fig. 2 - a hawk on a perch, the braided jesses are attached to the hawk’s ankles and to the perch
Observe the flying jesses hanging off this hawk’s anklets. They are smooth and contain no slits or holes; they won’t get caught on branches when the hawk lands in a tree. The hawk on a perch in the second photograph has braided mews jesses; these jesses are made with a slit where the leash is knotted to attach the bird to the perch. This hawk would never fly from the fist with these attached, because doing so would increase the risk of snagging and getting stuck, a potentially lethal situation. It’s not unusual for falconers to lose their hawks; but death by the wrong kind of jesses is another affront completely. To die in this way— because of human error — is a crime against the bird, the human who trained that bird, and the falconry community at large.
The Arthurian knight Lancelot learns about the consequences of falconry faux pas, and is in fact snagged himself into a questing trap, thanks to ill-suited jesses. Across Arthurian literature, Lancelot’s quests are so often interrupted by desperate ladies in need of assistance that they derail him from any kind of linear triumph. In fact, these mini-quests provide a suppleness and nuance to the otherwise unsubtle and frankly obtuse Lancelot, who struggles in visibly torturous ways at balancing his adulterous love for Queen Guenevere with his brotherly love for King Arthur. At the end of Malory’s book about Lancelot (Launcelot du Lake in the Winchester divisions and Book VI in the Caxton Morte D'Arthur), Lancelot has escaped a woman who confesses her plot to entrap, murder, embalm and wax his body in order to kiss and embrace it. It’s a shocking and bizarre scene that creates a disturbing and uncanny image, and yet, after hearing the detailed necrophilic plan, Lancelot emotes not at all. This persistent inscrutability contrasts with his emotional outpouring just moments later, when ‘he heard two bells ring. And then was he ware of a falcon came flying over his head toward an high elm, and long lunes [jesses or the short leash attached to jesses] about her feet, and as she flew unto the elm to take her perch the lunes over-cast about a bough. And when she would have taken her flight she hung by the legs fast; and Sir Launcelot saw how she hung, and beheld the fair falcon perigot, and he was sorry for her’ (Book VI, Chapter XVIII). He is so sorry, in fact, that he disarms himself down to his undergarments and climbs a tree—and ‘God knoweth I am an ill climber,’ Lancelot reminds his audience (Book VI, Chapter XVIII).
This is such a double-take moment in Malory’s enormous tome of Arthurian tales that my copy of Eugène Vinaver’s 811-page Malory Works opens to lay flat at this loosened page, which I’ve had to tape back into place. To modern readers still recovering from Lancelot’s narrow escape from becoming an embalmed sex toy a mere 25 lines prior, so much descriptive and emotive ink spilled over a falcon’s tangled jesses seems disconnected from the absurd yet palpable fears surrounding our intrepid knight (see Fig. 3).
Howard Pyle’s 1905 illustration, entitled ‘Sir Launcelot climbs to catch the lady’s falcon’ (source, Project Gutenberg)
Of course, as Howard Pyle’s 1905 illustration points out, there is a favor to a lady involved, which offers some clues to Lancelot’s behavior. Specifically, Lancelot’s quaking climb to ‘catch the lady’s falcon’ is connected to the one irresolvable quest undergirding and eventually unraveling the Roundtable brotherhood: Lancelot’s affair with Queen Guenevere. The lady who requests Lancelot’s assistance implores him, ‘help me to get my hawk, for [if] my hawk be lost my lord will destroy me; for I kept the hawk and she slipped from me, and if my lord my husband [discovers] it he is so hasty that he will slay me’ (Book VI, Chapter XVIII). Believing now that both the life of the falcon and the lady are in danger, Lancelot ‘put off all his clothes unto his shirt and breech, and with might and force he clomb up to the falcon, and tied the lines to a great rotten [bush], and threw the hawk down and it withal’ (Book VI, Chapter XVIII).
There is a double speak going on in these lines, out of reach for us as modern readers. First, the devastation of losing a falconry bird that is under one’s watch is a misstep that we can’t quite appreciate. But is it so grave as to merit lethal punishment? The second layer is the word faucon in the original Middle English, a borrowing from the Old French. Faucon was a popular medieval homophone for faux con (literally ‘false c-word’), implying ‘promiscuous woman’ through synecdoche—using a part for a whole—in this case genitals for the whole body, and, because it is a female body, an untrustworthy body. This meant that the mention of a ‘falcon’ could also usher in fears about an adulterous wife, an illegitimate heir, an uncontrollable body.
The twelfth-century Old French story Guillaume of the Faucon makes explicit use of the falcon as both the cuckold’s bird and his lady’s adulterous body. Guillaume, a distracted and inert squire, prefers to ogle his lord’s wife rather than advance to knighthood. While his lord attends a tournament, Guillaume opts to stay at the castle in order to profess his love to the lady, who promptly, and vehemently, refuses him. He goes on a hunger strike, which causes the lady great distress. Alternating between begging Guillaume to eat and threatening to expose his love-confession to her lord, who has now returned, the lady begins to disturb her husband by intimating the truth without actually revealing the truth. Believing the lady complicit in what he imagines a love affair, the lord threatens the lady with a physical beating. Admitting only that Guillaume was so sick because he craved his lord’s faucon, she saves herself and Guillaume from her lord’s suspicions. The pun grants Guillaume access to both the lord’s bird and wife, and the tale concludes with a lesson about persistence. This little narrative made the play on ‘falcon’ or ‘faucon’ a touchstone for stories and material objects depicting (adulterous) trysts. The possibility of multiple meanings contained in one word allows Malory to hide parts of the troubling content of canonical Arthurian legends. While the rest of his giant tome derives from the French prose cycle (an earlier version of Arthurian legends), the falcon-in-a-tree episode in Lancelot’s narrative is particular to Malory. Its deviation from the French prose cycle exemplifies Malory’s subtle anxiety about adultery, and perhaps even anxiety about the legibility or illegibility, controllability or autonomy of female bodies.
This scene helps reveal the text’s sensitivity to how others perceive women’s bodies—which we’ve seen in Lancleot since he is always reminded of his association with and favor from Queen Guenevere. But the tangled jesses, and their implied human error, redirect this sensitivity to Arthurian women’s plight regarding their handling of their own bodies. The lady falconer ends up being accused of betrayal and ‘falsehood,’ but not in the adulterous way we expect. We soon learn her husband has ‘commanded her’ to cast off the falcon with the wrong jesses on purpose so that the bird would get caught in the tree and thus catch the attention and pity of Lancelot, who would need to disarm himself to climb up and retrieve it, making him ‘a naked man’ vulnerable to ambush (Book VI, Chapter XVIII). When Lancelot then slays the lady’s husband, she bemoans her situation, perpelxing Lancelot—hadn’t her husband controlled her and forced her to play a part in betraying him? He doesn’t yet fully understand the extent to which the women around him are controlled, manipulated, and at fault no matter what they say or do. They are forever restrained and endangered by their mews jesses, even when they are meant to fly.
As Lancelot rides away, he soon encounters another couple who will complete this lesson about women’s double bind. A jealous Sir Pedivere threatens to slay his wife because he suspects her of cavorting with another man, a suspicion she denies. After Lancelot places the lady under his protection, Pedivere tricks him into looking the other way ‘and suddenly [Pedivere] swapped off his lady’s head,’ a crime Lancelot bemoans ‘hast shamed me for ever’ (Book VI, Chapter XVIII). He turns the murdered lady’s body into a kind of ambulant reliquary, ordering Pedivere to ‘take this lady and the head, and bear it upon thee, and here shalt thou swear upon my sword, to bear it always upon thy back, and never to rest till thou come to Queen Guenever’ (Book VI, Chapter XVIII). What looks like a morbid tribute to his beloved could, in light of the falcon-in-a-tree scene, be Lancelot’s acknowledgment of Guenevere’s, and all women’s, precarious position. And Guenevere seems to understand Lancelot’s growing discernment about women’s bodies when she comments on the decapitation as ‘a great rebuke unto Sir Launcelot’ and charges Pedivere to ‘never rest one night’ until he arrives ‘unto the Pope of Rome, and of him receive your penance for your foul deeds’ (Book VI, Chapter XVIII). Crucially, under the guise of sending him through the proper patriarchal channels of ecclesiastic contrition, Guenevere publically authors the real penance: ‘[if you] go to any bed the dead body shall lie with you’ (Book VI, Chapter XVIII). With a commandment to bury the body in Rome, the Pope releases Pedivere from this bedtime reminder of his abuse of women, and he ‘bade him go again unto Queen Guenever,’ relinquishing the power and control over the shriven Pedivere back to the queen (Book VI, Chapter XVIII). Guenevere’s manuever to control penance imagines a persistence of female authority under patriarchal structures, and such a tactic finds sympathy with medieval understandings of falconry.
That falconry was a shared activity practiced by both men and women, that the dominant of the species was female, and that both male and female falconers were hyper-aware of the danger of interfering with the bird’s body in damaging ways brings bodies and gender to the forefront of this book. Reading through falconry creates an opportunity to read Lancelot’s perplexity and growing consciousness in these episodes as distress for the impossible expectations placed on women, which Guenevere confirms with her strategic deployment of wisdom. The realization that restrictions placed on avian and female bodies causes more harm than protection is perceptible in these strange and uncanny episodes, which are always tainted with death or threat of death. Malory’s falconry lessons on the precarity of bodily autonomy are, unfortunately, not irrelevant today when women must wait until they are at the brink of death to be deemed worthy of bodily autonomy.
Works Cited
Guillaume au Faucon. In Cuckolds, Clerics, & Countrymen, ed. Raymond Eichmann and trans. John DuVal (Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1982), pp. 87–104. https://archive.org/details/cuckoldsclericsc0000unse/page/n11/mode/2up
Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte D’Arthur: King Arthur and his Noble knights of the Round Table, ed. William Caxton (1485). Project Gutenberg’s Le Morte D’Arthur, Volume I (of II), by Thomas Malory. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1251/1251-h/1251-h.htm
Pyle, Howard. The Story of the Champions of the Round Table (1905). The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Story of the Champions of the Round Table, Written and Illustrated by Howard Pyle. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10745/10745-h/10745-h.htm#p9
Shakespeare, William. The Taming of the Shrew, from The Folger Shakespeare, ed. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-taming-of-the-shrew/read/
Author Bio:
Sara Petrosillo (she/her) is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Evansville in Indiana.
