“A Cart that Charged was with hey”: The Symbolism of Hay in Chaucer’s “Friar’s Tale”

Chaucer’s “Friar’s Tale” condemns summoners for their links to Satan and their avaricious attachment to ephemeral goods. These two threads converge in the scene where the tale summoner urges his companion (a fiend) to seize a cart of hay and horses that were insincerely offered to the fiend by a frustrated carter. This essay examines the significance of Chaucer’s decision to specify hay as the contents of the cart. The Bible and other texts had long used hay as a symbol of ephemerality, materiality, and the sin of avarice, a late efflorescence of which is found in another medium, Bosch’s painting “The Haywain”. The summoner’s willful insistence on taking the cart of hay draws him closer to the very substance that symbolizes his own sinful propensities and secures the certainty of his damnation well before the actual event.