Rabbits Pulling a Cart

A hound lies stretched across the cart bed. The black rows of the main text stop above; the vehicle passes along the lower edge of the page. One wheel shows beneath the board, and in front two rabbits are harnessed to the traces. The hound nearly fills the cart bed, while the rabbits are much smaller, yet the straps tense all three bodies in the same direction. There are no bows or arrows visible here, no chase in progress, only a cart that seems already to have missed its beginning. This is one scene from the continuous marginal decoration of the Smithfield Decretals.

Turn back a few pages from this cart, and what is missing is not an ordinary rabbit hunt. Several pages earlier, the figure holding the bow is also, precisely, a rabbit: it first shoots the hound with an arrow; then its companions bind the dog and bring it before a seated rabbit; only afterward come the cart and the hanging tree. Another adjacent sequence applies the same rhythm to a human body: the hunter is shot in the back, stripped of his clothes, bound, dragged up a slope, and finally beheaded. The hound has not accidentally wandered into the rabbits’ revenge on the hunter; it has its own almost parallel ordeal.

In this light, the most immediate interpretation in fact gains evidence: the prey take up the hunting gear and turn the hunters, one after another, into prey. Perhaps this set of marginal scenes is only escalating, page by page, the joke of the world turned upside down; repetition itself is funny enough, and owes us no deeper allegory. Yet the cart still adds an awkward action beyond “rabbits take revenge.” The rabbits have already held the bow, judged, and executed, but when carrying the hound away they personally enter the harness. The victors borrow the posture of the burden-bearer in order to send the defeated toward its end. This detail does not overturn revenge; it only makes the reversal no longer as clean as swapping two names.

The two rabbits pull the cart out of this page. In the final image, the hound hangs from a tree, and a spear-bearing rabbit is leaving from beneath it.