The ‘Canterbury Tales’ are the most famous of Chaucer’s works. He began to write them in the 1380s and although they display the style he developed in his English Period, they also include some material he had written earlier. (for example, there is evidence of earlier works being revised in the ‘Clerk’s Tale’ and the ‘Monk’s Tale’.) Chaucer also specifically referred to ‘The Legende of Good Women’ and to ‘Lyf of Seynt Cecyle’ in the Prologue.
There have been some suggestions that there exist close links between Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’ (of which there is no evidence that Chaucer ever saw) and various other continental works. However, apart from the use of an enclosing narrative within which to frame the tales, ‘Canterbury Tales’ appears to be an original and distinctively English work.
The work is a collection of tales told by twenty-nine pilgrims who meet at an inn on their way to Canterbury Cathedral which became a site of pilgrimage after the brutal murder of Thomas Becket there, and the poet himself is a lively presence in the tales.
Bifel that in that seson on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.
--- General Prologue
As Chaucer’s lines quoted above show, he met the pilgrims at the inn. He says that the host of the inn, Harry Bailey said that he would accompany them as a guide and that they should all tell tales – two each, both on the way there and on the way back – and that the one who told the best tale would win a supper at the cost of the other pilgrims on their return from Canterbury.
Thus, the original plan was to have about one hundred and twenty tales told. However, there are only twenty-four tales which have survived the ages and scholars are not sure what the correct sequence of the fragments is – unlike in the case of Shakespeare, there are no metrical tests which can aid such a determination.
Chaucer warns his readers that he must repeat all the tales as he heard them. The tales themselves reveal why he themselves reveal why he feels the need to give his readers this warning – they are distinguished by their humour, satire and naturalism. They tell the stories of a wide variety of people including a prioress, a wife, a man of law, a poet, a cook, a squire and a knight. As this list shows, the pilgrims were neither very rich – the rich would not have mixed in such company –nor were they very poor – the poor would not have been able to go on a pilgrimage.
Thus, the pilgrims belonged to the middle class. Some of their tales such as the Miller’s Tale, the Reeves’s Tale, the Shipmans’s Tale, the Summoner’s Tale and the Cook’s Tale belong to a distinctive medieval literary comic genre known as the Fabliau.
The Fabliau was dead as a genre when Chaucer chose to revive it in the ‘Canterbury Tales’. It was originally a French genre and there is no concrete evidence to show why Chaucer turned to it but it may have been because he was attracted to its irreverential attitudes towards societal norms and conventional morality – a typical fabliau was a brief comic tale in verse, usually scurrilous and often scatological or otherwise obscene. The style was simple and straightforward and the characters belonged to the middle or lower classes. Considering this though, it is no surprise Chaucer repeatedly warned his readers of the content in the ‘Canterbury Tales’.
Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys.
The Millere is a cherl; ye knowe wel this.
So was the Reve eek and othere mo,
And harlotrie they tolden bothe two.
--- Miller's Prologue
The first tale in ‘Canterbury Tales’ is the ‘Tale of the Knight’. (The pilgrims drew straws to decide who would begin.) Chaucer's knight had had a distinguished career and his tale was one of romance – it was about the love of Palamon and Arcite for Emily and the eventual marriage of Palamon and Emily which brought peace between Athens and Thebes. It is demi-classical and probably reflects how knights understood the ‘noble ideal’ at the time.
The miller then told a tale where the clerk of a carpenter and a parish clerk both lusted after a carpenter’s wife. The carpenter’s clerk tricked the carpenter into sleeping in a tub in anticipation of Noah’s Flood coming again while he went to the bedroom with the carpenter’s wife. The two were interrupted by the parish clerk who asked for a kiss. The woman stuck her bottom out of the window and, not realising this, the parish clerk planted a kiss on it. Furious, he then heated a plough blade and asked for another kiss. The second time, the carpenter’s clerk took the place of the woman but instead of being kissed, he was struck with the hot blade. In pain, he shouted for water and, in the process, he woke the carpenter and caused the neighbours to rush in. however, not realising what had happened, the carpenter thought that the cries for water were due to the coming of the second flood and the neighbours thought that he was insane. Thus, the ‘Miller’s Tale’ reveals the medieval understanding of Noah’s Flood and embodies the common medieval motif of the misdirected kiss.
After that came the ‘Tale of the Reeve’. The reeve spoke of a thieving miller, the intellectual trickery of clerks and of the miller finally being beaten. It is a slapstick comedy about mistaken beds and is much less jolly than the tale told by the miller. It was probably motivated by the reeve’s desire for revenge and may have been based on ‘Gombert and the Two Clerks’ by Jean Bodel.
Once the reeve finished, the man of law took over and told his tale in the medieval tradition of tales about exiled queens. His tale was about Constance who had also appeared in Gower’s ‘Confessio Amantis’. The man of law praised Chaucer for his exaltation of women and said that he would not tell cursed tales of incest (which is the cause of Constance’s exile in an early work referred to in ‘Emare’ in the fourteenth century) although Gower said nothing about incest. The man of law also ensured that his tale ended happily: in Chaucer’s version of Constance’s Tale told by the man of law, she was reunited with her father, the Emperor of Rome and her son succeeded him to the imperial throne. Chaucer composed the ‘Man of Law’s Tale’ in rime royal which he himself created and which is one of his most important contributions to English Poetry.
The cook then told a tale in which an apprentice moved in with a thief after his master charged him with theft. The thief’s wife ‘swyved’ for a livelihood although she ran a shop as a front. Chaucer himself appears not to have completed this tale. Some medieval scribes inserted the “Tale of the Gamelyn’ after it – this was the source of Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ – but this is no longer done. A few scholars have also speculated about whether the gamelyn’s tale was meant to substitute the cook’s tale but there has been no concrete evidence to support this proposition.
‘Canterbury Tales’ continues with the ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’. This tale includes a prologue which speaks of the wife of Bath herself. Her name was Alisoun and she had been married five times. She said that three of her husbands had been good and two, bad. The first three were old and rich. One was unfaithful; she got her revenge by pretending to be unfaithful herself. Another knocked her down so hard that she became deaf. She pretended to be dying and when he then leaned over to ask for forgiveness, she responded by knocking him into the fireplace. After this, they made up, he gave her sovereignty in marriage and they apparently lived in bliss.
The tale she told was an Arthurian romance about a man who saved himself from a death sentence and got a beautiful wife by discovering what it is that women most desire: sovereignty over their husbands. By later allowing his wife to choose how she would appear to him instead of choosing for her, she decided to turn herself into a beautiful young maiden all the time and they lived together happily.
Both the ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’ and its prologue are full of advice for would-be wicked wives. The tale also speaks of the ability of love to transform a person and of the nature of true ‘gentillesse’ which depends on deeds and not on birth. Chaucer drew on a number of different sources including Dante’s ‘Convivo’ to write this tale. In fact, having the wife of Bath quote Dante at all significantly increases the complexity of her character.
The ‘Friar’s Tale’ came next and it was directly aimed at the summoner – his rival when it came to preying on the poor. In his tale, a summoner was carried off by the devil when a poor widow on whom he served a false summons cursed him ‘from the heart’. The tale is short and is an Exemplum: a type of story frequently used by medieval preachers to make a moral point.
The summoner responded to this by telling an equally nasty tale about a friar in the ‘Summoner’s Prologue and Tale’. He told the story of a friar who preached a sermon on the evils of anger to a man whose illness had made grouchy. When the friar in the tale insisted on being given a rich gift in payment for the sermon, the man said he would do so only if he swore to divide it equally among the members of his convent and then proceeded to fart on the friar’s hand. The outraged friar complained to the lord of the manor who became far in interested in trying to understand how to divide the indivisible than in addressing the friar’s complaint. His squire ultimately suggested that the friar himself fart at the centre of a wheel around which the members of his convent had place their noses so that they would all smell it equally.
After this, the clerk began to tell a tale. The innkeeper (whose idea it had been to tell tales) asked him to tell the tale in a simple manner. The result is that, unlike the man of law’s tale, the ‘Clerk’s Tale’ is not in the High Style. It is based on a story Boccacio wrote in ‘Decameron’ (Tenth Day, Tenth Tale). The tale describes how Walter, a marquis, chose Griselda, the daughter of a serf as his wife and then proceeded to test her obedience; she had sworn to obey him and not to question anything he did before they got married. He pretended to kill their children and then sent her away telling her that he wanted to take a new wife. He then sent for her son and daughter (whom he had supposedly killed) and told her that the girl was to be his new wife. After her return at his behest, he announced that she had passed his tests and that her children were alive and welcomed her as his wife.
The next tale was about an old man who had been cuckolded by his wife and was told by the merchant. It brings out the medieval understanding of marriage and St Jerome’s ‘Adversus Jovinianum’ is quoted in it. The tale is in the High Style and displays Chaucer’s command over rhetoric. The tale has sparked much debate. In many ways it is like a fabliau but its mixture of genres and violation of many standard norms have made scholars suspect that it reflects the real own marital experiences more than it simply narrates a story detached from the narrator.
Once this rather sombre tale had been told, the squire told his tale. It was about a knight who rode in during a feast bearing gifts for King Cambuskan and his children – two sons and a daughter. The daughter received a magic mirror and a ring which enabled her to understand a wounder falcon he came across who had been betrayed by a false lover. Although it is mentioned in the tale that the stories of the king and his sons will be told, nothing more is said about them in the ‘Canterbury Tales’. It is unclear whether Chaucer meant to write these tales later and simply did not do so, or if the tales have been lost, or if the ‘Squire’s Tale’ is meant to be only half told. Many people thought that it had been left to be completed at a later date and a few people did in fact try to complete it themselves. For example, a continuation can be found in books III and IV of Spenser’s ‘Fairie Queen’ although writing such a continuation could not have been easy since the tale has no obvious source; it simply seems to reflect the medieval curiosity about the orient.
In the version of the ‘Canterbury Tales’ which has come down to us, the squire was interrupted by the franklin who proceeded to tell a Breton Lay about romance and freedom. In his tale, two people got married swearing never to exercise absolute power over each other. The wife was later wooed by a squire and she told her that she would give him her love if he got some coastal rocks for her. The squire did so with the help of a clerk who demanded a large fee and then demanded that she keep her promise. Her husband too told her to do so when she told him about what had happened. Impressed by the husband’s magnanimity, the squire released the wife from her promise and the clerk, in turn impressed by the squire, did not collect his fee. The unanswered question in this tale is, “Who is the most free?” The tale does not have an obvious source although the moving of rocks is seen in Merlin’s legend, and Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’ speaks of setting impossible tasks for would-be lovers. The tale itself is the end of the ‘marriage group’ in the ‘Canterbury Tales’ which begins with the wife of Bath’s tale and discusses rules in a marriage.
The next tale is about the consequences of sin and is told by the physician. In this tale, a wicked judge who had his eye on a virginal girl and tried to attain her by awarding her to his churl as a slave in a false case received his just deserts. The girl’s father slayed her and brought her head to the judge after the award was made. The people, infuriated by the whole sequence of events, not only imprisoned the judge but also condemned the churl to be hanged. The girl’s father intervened on the churl’s behalf to have his life spared though and he was therefore merely exiled. This tale shows Chaucer’s ability to convey pitiable circumstances especially in the narration of the father cutting off his daughter’s head (to save her honour). The poet has himself said that he referred to ‘Virginia and Appius’ by Titus Livius although it is obvious that he also referred to ‘La Roman de la Rose’.
The pilgrims were then told about the consequences of gluttony in the ‘Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale’ in which the pardoner also described the tricks of his own trade. The tale itself is an exemplum which makes its moral point through the story of three riotous young men whose gluttony ultimately directly lead to two of them dying – the three of them set out to kill death. They met an old man en route whom they asked for directions. He led them to a pot of gold. The youngest of them then went to get food and wine from a town. He poisoned the wine though. On his return, the other two killed him and then died themselves when they drank the poisoned wine. The pardoner’s tale was very popular in contemporary stories although the old man is a mysterious figure in Chaucer’s version.
Somehow, the pardoner and the host managed to get into a fight once this tale was told and the knight had to intervene to preserve the peace. After harmony had been restored, the shipman told a tale which, unlike the other tales, was set in France and which exhibited the relationship between sex and money. In this tale, a monk borrowed money from a husband which he gave to the husband’s wife and in exchange, he took her to bed. When the husband asked him to return the money, the monk told him that he had given it to his wife but when he asked her for it, she told him that she had spent it on clothes which he had worn for his honour and that she would repay him in bed.
After this tale was told, the prioress stepped in. she was obviously high-born and was not entirely free from coquettishness as is evidenced by her riding side-saddle – a fashion which had only just come into vogue when Chaucer wrote the ‘Canterbury Tales’. The ‘Prioress’s Tale’ is in the tradition of tales about the Virgin Mary. In this tale, the Virgin apparently places a grain on the tongue of a Christian boy who had been murdered by Jews so that he could sing even after he had died till his corpse was found and the grain was removed. The tale is intensely anti-Semitic and, in it, the boy is buried as a martyr.
Chaucer himself then narrated a minstrel romance to the pilgrims about Sir Thopas, a knight whom all the maidens loved but who was in love with an elf-queen he had seen in a dream. The tale appeared to be interminable so the host cut Chaucer short and asked him to tell another tale. The poet agreed and told a prose tale about a melibee.
...and the tales go on.
There have been some suggestions that there exist close links between Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’ (of which there is no evidence that Chaucer ever saw) and various other continental works. However, apart from the use of an enclosing narrative within which to frame the tales, ‘Canterbury Tales’ appears to be an original and distinctively English work.
The work is a collection of tales told by twenty-nine pilgrims who meet at an inn on their way to Canterbury Cathedral which became a site of pilgrimage after the brutal murder of Thomas Becket there, and the poet himself is a lively presence in the tales.
Bifel that in that seson on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.
--- General Prologue
As Chaucer’s lines quoted above show, he met the pilgrims at the inn. He says that the host of the inn, Harry Bailey said that he would accompany them as a guide and that they should all tell tales – two each, both on the way there and on the way back – and that the one who told the best tale would win a supper at the cost of the other pilgrims on their return from Canterbury.
Thus, the original plan was to have about one hundred and twenty tales told. However, there are only twenty-four tales which have survived the ages and scholars are not sure what the correct sequence of the fragments is – unlike in the case of Shakespeare, there are no metrical tests which can aid such a determination.
Chaucer warns his readers that he must repeat all the tales as he heard them. The tales themselves reveal why he themselves reveal why he feels the need to give his readers this warning – they are distinguished by their humour, satire and naturalism. They tell the stories of a wide variety of people including a prioress, a wife, a man of law, a poet, a cook, a squire and a knight. As this list shows, the pilgrims were neither very rich – the rich would not have mixed in such company –nor were they very poor – the poor would not have been able to go on a pilgrimage.
Thus, the pilgrims belonged to the middle class. Some of their tales such as the Miller’s Tale, the Reeves’s Tale, the Shipmans’s Tale, the Summoner’s Tale and the Cook’s Tale belong to a distinctive medieval literary comic genre known as the Fabliau.
The Fabliau was dead as a genre when Chaucer chose to revive it in the ‘Canterbury Tales’. It was originally a French genre and there is no concrete evidence to show why Chaucer turned to it but it may have been because he was attracted to its irreverential attitudes towards societal norms and conventional morality – a typical fabliau was a brief comic tale in verse, usually scurrilous and often scatological or otherwise obscene. The style was simple and straightforward and the characters belonged to the middle or lower classes. Considering this though, it is no surprise Chaucer repeatedly warned his readers of the content in the ‘Canterbury Tales’.
Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys.
The Millere is a cherl; ye knowe wel this.
So was the Reve eek and othere mo,
And harlotrie they tolden bothe two.
--- Miller's Prologue
The first tale in ‘Canterbury Tales’ is the ‘Tale of the Knight’. (The pilgrims drew straws to decide who would begin.) Chaucer's knight had had a distinguished career and his tale was one of romance – it was about the love of Palamon and Arcite for Emily and the eventual marriage of Palamon and Emily which brought peace between Athens and Thebes. It is demi-classical and probably reflects how knights understood the ‘noble ideal’ at the time.
The miller then told a tale where the clerk of a carpenter and a parish clerk both lusted after a carpenter’s wife. The carpenter’s clerk tricked the carpenter into sleeping in a tub in anticipation of Noah’s Flood coming again while he went to the bedroom with the carpenter’s wife. The two were interrupted by the parish clerk who asked for a kiss. The woman stuck her bottom out of the window and, not realising this, the parish clerk planted a kiss on it. Furious, he then heated a plough blade and asked for another kiss. The second time, the carpenter’s clerk took the place of the woman but instead of being kissed, he was struck with the hot blade. In pain, he shouted for water and, in the process, he woke the carpenter and caused the neighbours to rush in. however, not realising what had happened, the carpenter thought that the cries for water were due to the coming of the second flood and the neighbours thought that he was insane. Thus, the ‘Miller’s Tale’ reveals the medieval understanding of Noah’s Flood and embodies the common medieval motif of the misdirected kiss.
After that came the ‘Tale of the Reeve’. The reeve spoke of a thieving miller, the intellectual trickery of clerks and of the miller finally being beaten. It is a slapstick comedy about mistaken beds and is much less jolly than the tale told by the miller. It was probably motivated by the reeve’s desire for revenge and may have been based on ‘Gombert and the Two Clerks’ by Jean Bodel.
Once the reeve finished, the man of law took over and told his tale in the medieval tradition of tales about exiled queens. His tale was about Constance who had also appeared in Gower’s ‘Confessio Amantis’. The man of law praised Chaucer for his exaltation of women and said that he would not tell cursed tales of incest (which is the cause of Constance’s exile in an early work referred to in ‘Emare’ in the fourteenth century) although Gower said nothing about incest. The man of law also ensured that his tale ended happily: in Chaucer’s version of Constance’s Tale told by the man of law, she was reunited with her father, the Emperor of Rome and her son succeeded him to the imperial throne. Chaucer composed the ‘Man of Law’s Tale’ in rime royal which he himself created and which is one of his most important contributions to English Poetry.
The cook then told a tale in which an apprentice moved in with a thief after his master charged him with theft. The thief’s wife ‘swyved’ for a livelihood although she ran a shop as a front. Chaucer himself appears not to have completed this tale. Some medieval scribes inserted the “Tale of the Gamelyn’ after it – this was the source of Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ – but this is no longer done. A few scholars have also speculated about whether the gamelyn’s tale was meant to substitute the cook’s tale but there has been no concrete evidence to support this proposition.
‘Canterbury Tales’ continues with the ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’. This tale includes a prologue which speaks of the wife of Bath herself. Her name was Alisoun and she had been married five times. She said that three of her husbands had been good and two, bad. The first three were old and rich. One was unfaithful; she got her revenge by pretending to be unfaithful herself. Another knocked her down so hard that she became deaf. She pretended to be dying and when he then leaned over to ask for forgiveness, she responded by knocking him into the fireplace. After this, they made up, he gave her sovereignty in marriage and they apparently lived in bliss.
The tale she told was an Arthurian romance about a man who saved himself from a death sentence and got a beautiful wife by discovering what it is that women most desire: sovereignty over their husbands. By later allowing his wife to choose how she would appear to him instead of choosing for her, she decided to turn herself into a beautiful young maiden all the time and they lived together happily.
Both the ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’ and its prologue are full of advice for would-be wicked wives. The tale also speaks of the ability of love to transform a person and of the nature of true ‘gentillesse’ which depends on deeds and not on birth. Chaucer drew on a number of different sources including Dante’s ‘Convivo’ to write this tale. In fact, having the wife of Bath quote Dante at all significantly increases the complexity of her character.
The ‘Friar’s Tale’ came next and it was directly aimed at the summoner – his rival when it came to preying on the poor. In his tale, a summoner was carried off by the devil when a poor widow on whom he served a false summons cursed him ‘from the heart’. The tale is short and is an Exemplum: a type of story frequently used by medieval preachers to make a moral point.
The summoner responded to this by telling an equally nasty tale about a friar in the ‘Summoner’s Prologue and Tale’. He told the story of a friar who preached a sermon on the evils of anger to a man whose illness had made grouchy. When the friar in the tale insisted on being given a rich gift in payment for the sermon, the man said he would do so only if he swore to divide it equally among the members of his convent and then proceeded to fart on the friar’s hand. The outraged friar complained to the lord of the manor who became far in interested in trying to understand how to divide the indivisible than in addressing the friar’s complaint. His squire ultimately suggested that the friar himself fart at the centre of a wheel around which the members of his convent had place their noses so that they would all smell it equally.
After this, the clerk began to tell a tale. The innkeeper (whose idea it had been to tell tales) asked him to tell the tale in a simple manner. The result is that, unlike the man of law’s tale, the ‘Clerk’s Tale’ is not in the High Style. It is based on a story Boccacio wrote in ‘Decameron’ (Tenth Day, Tenth Tale). The tale describes how Walter, a marquis, chose Griselda, the daughter of a serf as his wife and then proceeded to test her obedience; she had sworn to obey him and not to question anything he did before they got married. He pretended to kill their children and then sent her away telling her that he wanted to take a new wife. He then sent for her son and daughter (whom he had supposedly killed) and told her that the girl was to be his new wife. After her return at his behest, he announced that she had passed his tests and that her children were alive and welcomed her as his wife.
The next tale was about an old man who had been cuckolded by his wife and was told by the merchant. It brings out the medieval understanding of marriage and St Jerome’s ‘Adversus Jovinianum’ is quoted in it. The tale is in the High Style and displays Chaucer’s command over rhetoric. The tale has sparked much debate. In many ways it is like a fabliau but its mixture of genres and violation of many standard norms have made scholars suspect that it reflects the real own marital experiences more than it simply narrates a story detached from the narrator.
Once this rather sombre tale had been told, the squire told his tale. It was about a knight who rode in during a feast bearing gifts for King Cambuskan and his children – two sons and a daughter. The daughter received a magic mirror and a ring which enabled her to understand a wounder falcon he came across who had been betrayed by a false lover. Although it is mentioned in the tale that the stories of the king and his sons will be told, nothing more is said about them in the ‘Canterbury Tales’. It is unclear whether Chaucer meant to write these tales later and simply did not do so, or if the tales have been lost, or if the ‘Squire’s Tale’ is meant to be only half told. Many people thought that it had been left to be completed at a later date and a few people did in fact try to complete it themselves. For example, a continuation can be found in books III and IV of Spenser’s ‘Fairie Queen’ although writing such a continuation could not have been easy since the tale has no obvious source; it simply seems to reflect the medieval curiosity about the orient.
In the version of the ‘Canterbury Tales’ which has come down to us, the squire was interrupted by the franklin who proceeded to tell a Breton Lay about romance and freedom. In his tale, two people got married swearing never to exercise absolute power over each other. The wife was later wooed by a squire and she told her that she would give him her love if he got some coastal rocks for her. The squire did so with the help of a clerk who demanded a large fee and then demanded that she keep her promise. Her husband too told her to do so when she told him about what had happened. Impressed by the husband’s magnanimity, the squire released the wife from her promise and the clerk, in turn impressed by the squire, did not collect his fee. The unanswered question in this tale is, “Who is the most free?” The tale does not have an obvious source although the moving of rocks is seen in Merlin’s legend, and Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’ speaks of setting impossible tasks for would-be lovers. The tale itself is the end of the ‘marriage group’ in the ‘Canterbury Tales’ which begins with the wife of Bath’s tale and discusses rules in a marriage.
The next tale is about the consequences of sin and is told by the physician. In this tale, a wicked judge who had his eye on a virginal girl and tried to attain her by awarding her to his churl as a slave in a false case received his just deserts. The girl’s father slayed her and brought her head to the judge after the award was made. The people, infuriated by the whole sequence of events, not only imprisoned the judge but also condemned the churl to be hanged. The girl’s father intervened on the churl’s behalf to have his life spared though and he was therefore merely exiled. This tale shows Chaucer’s ability to convey pitiable circumstances especially in the narration of the father cutting off his daughter’s head (to save her honour). The poet has himself said that he referred to ‘Virginia and Appius’ by Titus Livius although it is obvious that he also referred to ‘La Roman de la Rose’.
The pilgrims were then told about the consequences of gluttony in the ‘Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale’ in which the pardoner also described the tricks of his own trade. The tale itself is an exemplum which makes its moral point through the story of three riotous young men whose gluttony ultimately directly lead to two of them dying – the three of them set out to kill death. They met an old man en route whom they asked for directions. He led them to a pot of gold. The youngest of them then went to get food and wine from a town. He poisoned the wine though. On his return, the other two killed him and then died themselves when they drank the poisoned wine. The pardoner’s tale was very popular in contemporary stories although the old man is a mysterious figure in Chaucer’s version.
Somehow, the pardoner and the host managed to get into a fight once this tale was told and the knight had to intervene to preserve the peace. After harmony had been restored, the shipman told a tale which, unlike the other tales, was set in France and which exhibited the relationship between sex and money. In this tale, a monk borrowed money from a husband which he gave to the husband’s wife and in exchange, he took her to bed. When the husband asked him to return the money, the monk told him that he had given it to his wife but when he asked her for it, she told him that she had spent it on clothes which he had worn for his honour and that she would repay him in bed.
After this tale was told, the prioress stepped in. she was obviously high-born and was not entirely free from coquettishness as is evidenced by her riding side-saddle – a fashion which had only just come into vogue when Chaucer wrote the ‘Canterbury Tales’. The ‘Prioress’s Tale’ is in the tradition of tales about the Virgin Mary. In this tale, the Virgin apparently places a grain on the tongue of a Christian boy who had been murdered by Jews so that he could sing even after he had died till his corpse was found and the grain was removed. The tale is intensely anti-Semitic and, in it, the boy is buried as a martyr.
Chaucer himself then narrated a minstrel romance to the pilgrims about Sir Thopas, a knight whom all the maidens loved but who was in love with an elf-queen he had seen in a dream. The tale appeared to be interminable so the host cut Chaucer short and asked him to tell another tale. The poet agreed and told a prose tale about a melibee.
...and the tales go on.