Context
T he Canterbury Tales is
the most famous and
critically acclaimed work of Geoffrey Chaucer, a late-fourteenth-century
English poet. Little is known about Chaucer’s personal life, and even less
about his education, but a number of existing records document his professional
life. Chaucer was born in London in the early 1340s, the only son in his
family. Chaucer’s father, originally a property-owning wine merchant, became
tremendously wealthy when he inherited the property of relatives who had died in
the Black Death of 1349. He was therefore able to send the young Geoffrey off
as a page to the Countess of Ulster, which meant that Geoffrey was not required
to follow in his ancestors’ footsteps and become a merchant. Eventually,
Chaucer began to serve the countess’s husband, Prince Lionel, son to King
Edward III. For most of his life, Chaucer served in the Hundred Years War
between England and France, both as a soldier and, since he was fluent in
French and Italian and conversant in Latin and other tongues, as a diplomat.
His diplomatic travels brought him twice to Italy, where he might have met
Boccaccio, whose writing influenced Chaucer’s work, and Petrarch.
In or around 1378, Chaucer began to
develop his vision of an English poetry that would be linguistically accessible
to all—obedient neither to the court, whose official language was French, nor
to the Church, whose official language was Latin. Instead, Chaucer wrote in the
vernacular, the English that was spoken in and around London in his day. Undoubtedly,
he was influenced by the writings of the Florentines Dante, Petrarch, and
Boccaccio, who wrote in the Italian vernacular. Even in England, the practice
was becoming increasingly common among poets, although many were still writing
in French and Latin.
That the nobles and kings Chaucer
served (Richard II until 1399, then Henry IV) were impressed with Chaucer’s
skills as a negotiator is obvious from the many rewards he received for his
service. Money, provisions, higher appointments, and property eventually
allowed him to retire on a royal pension. In 1374, the king appointed Chaucer
Controller of the Customs of Hides, Skins and Wools in the port of London,
which meant that he was a government official who worked with cloth importers.
His experience overseeing imported cloths might be why he frequently describes
in exquisite detail the garments and fabric that attire his characters. Chaucer
held the position at the customhouse for twelve years, after which he left
London for Kent, the county in which Canterbury is located. He served as a
justice of the peace for Kent, living in debt, and was then appointed Clerk of
the Works at various holdings of the king, including Westminster and the Tower
of London. After he retired in the early 1390s, he seems to have been working
primarily on The Canterbury
Tales, which he began around
1387. By the time of his retirement, Chaucer had already written a substantial
amount of narrative poetry, including the celebrated romance Troilus and Criseyde.
Chaucer’s personal life is less
documented than his professional life. In the late 1360s, he married Philippa
Roet, who served Edward III’s queen. They had at least two sons together.
Philippa was the sister to the mistress of John of Gaunt, the duke of
Lancaster. For John of Gaunt, Chaucer wrote one of his first poems, The Book of the Duchess, which was a lament for the premature
death of John’s young wife, Blanche. Whether or not Chaucer had an extramarital
affair is a matter of some contention among historians. In a legal document
that dates from 1380, a woman named Cecily Chaumpaigne released Chaucer from
the accusation of seizing her (raptus), though whether the expression denotes
that he raped her, committed adultery with her, or abducted her son is unclear.
Chaucer’s wife Philippa apparently died in 1387.
Chaucer lived through a time of
incredible tension in the English social sphere. The Black Death, which ravaged
England during Chaucer’s childhood and remained widespread afterward, wiped out
an estimated thirty to fifty percent of the population. Consequently, the labor
force gained increased leverage and was able to bargain for better wages, which
led to resentment from the nobles and propertied classes. These classes
received another blow in 1381, when the peasantry, helped by the artisan class,
revolted against them. The merchants were also wielding increasing power over
the legal establishment, as the Hundred Years War created profit for England
and, consequently, appetite for luxury was growing. The merchants capitalized
on the demand for luxury goods, and when Chaucer was growing up, London was
pretty much run by a merchant oligarchy, which attempted to control both the
aristocracy and the lesser artisan classes. Chaucer’s political sentiments are
unclear, for although The
Canterbury Tales documents
the various social tensions in the manner of the popular genre of estates
satire, the narrator refrains from making overt political statements, and what
he does say is in no way thought to represent Chaucer’s own sentiments.
Chaucer’s original plan for The Canterbury Tales was for each character to tell four
tales, two on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. But, instead of
120 tales, the text ends after twenty-four tales, and the party is still on its
way to Canterbury. Chaucer either planned to revise the structure to cap the
work at twenty-four tales, or else left it incomplete when he died on October
25, 1400. Other writers and printers soon recognized The Canterbury Tales as a masterful and highly original
work. Though Chaucer had been influenced by the great French and Italian
writers of his age, works like Boccaccio’s Decameron were not accessible to most English
readers, so the format of The
Canterbury Tales, and the
intense realism of its characters, were virtually unknown to readers in the
fourteenth century before Chaucer. William Caxton, England’s first printer,
published The Canterbury Tales in the 1470s, and it continued to
enjoy a rich printing history that never truly faded. By the English
Renaissance, poetry critic George Puttenham had identified Chaucer as the
father of the English literary canon. Chaucer’s project to create a literature
and poetic language for all classes of society succeeded, and today Chaucer
still stands as one of the great shapers of literary narrative and character.
Language in The Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales is written in Middle English, which
bears a close visual resemblance to the English written and spoken today. In
contrast, Old English (the language of Beowulf, for example) can be read only
in modern translation or by students of Old English. Students often read The Canterbury Tales in its original language, not only
because of the similarity between Chaucer’s Middle English and our own, but
because the beauty and humor of the poetry—all of its internal and external
rhymes, and the sounds it produces—would be lost in translation.
The best way for a beginner to
approach Middle English is to read it out loud. When the words are pronounced,
it is often much easier to recognize what they mean in modern English. Most
Middle English editions of the poem include a short pronunciation guide, which
can help the reader to understand the language better. For particularly
difficult words or phrases, most editions also include notes in the margin
giving the modern versions of the words, along with a full glossary in the
back. Several online Chaucer glossaries exist, as well as a number of printed
lexicons of Middle English.
The Order of The Canterbury Tales
The line numbers cited is based on
the line numbers given in The
Riverside Chaucer, the
authoritative edition of Chaucer’s works. The line numbering in The Riverside Chaucer does not run continuously throughout
the entire Canterbury Tales, but it does not restart at the beginning of each
tale, either. Instead, the tales are grouped together into fragments, and each fragment is numbered as a
separate whole.
Nobody knows exactly in what order
Chaucer intended to present the tales, or even if he had a specific order in
mind for all of them. Eighty-two early manuscripts of the tales survive, and
many of them vary considerably in the order in which they present the tales.
However, certain sets of tales do seem to belong together in a particular
order. For instance, the General Prologue is obviously the beginning, then the
narrator explicitly says that the Knight tells the first tale, and that the
Miller interrupts and tells the second tale. The introductions, prologues, and
epilogues to various tales sometimes include the pilgrims’ comments on the tale
just finished, and an indication of who tells the next tale. These sections
between the tales are called links, and they are the best evidence for
grouping the tales together into ten fragments. But The Canterbury Tales does not include a complete set of
links, so the order of the ten fragments is open to question.The Riverside
Chaucer bases the order of
the ten fragments on the order presented in the Ellesmere manuscript, one of
the best surviving manuscripts of the tale. Some scholars disagree with the
groupings and order of tales followed in The
Riverside Chaucer, choosing
instead to base the order on a combination of the links and the geographical
landmarks that the pilgrims pass on the way to Canterbury.
Plot Overview
General Prologue
At the Tabard Inn, a tavern in
Southwark, near London, the narrator joins a company of twenty-nine pilgrims.
The pilgrims, like the narrator, are traveling to the shrine of the martyr
Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The narrator gives a descriptive account of
twenty-seven of these pilgrims, including a Knight, Squire, Yeoman, Prioress,
Monk, Friar, Merchant, Clerk, Man of Law, Franklin, Haberdasher, Carpenter,
Weaver, Dyer, Tapestry-Weaver, Cook, Shipman, Physician, Wife, Parson, Plowman,
Miller, Manciple, Reeve, Summoner, Pardoner, and Host. (He does not describe
the Second Nun or the Nun’s Priest, although both characters appear later in
the book.) The Host, whose name, we find out in the Prologue to the Cook’s
Tale, is Harry Bailey, suggests that the group ride together and entertain one
another with stories. He decides that each pilgrim will tell two stories on the
way to Canterbury and two on the way back. Whomever he judges to be the best
storyteller will receive a meal at Bailey’s tavern, courtesy of the other
pilgrims. The pilgrims draw lots and determine that the Knight will tell the
first tale.
The Knight’s Tale
Theseus, duke of Athens, imprisons
Arcite and Palamon, two knights from Thebes (another city in ancient Greece).
From their prison, the knights see and fall in love with Theseus’s
sister-in-law, Emelye. Through the intervention of a friend, Arcite is freed,
but he is banished from Athens. He returns in disguise and becomes a page in
Emelye’s chamber. Palamon escapes from prison, and the two meet and fight over
Emelye. Theseus apprehends them and arranges a tournament between the two
knights and their allies, with Emelye as the prize. Arcite wins, but he is
accidentally thrown from his horse and dies. Palamon then marries Emelye.
The Miller’s Prologue and Tale
The Host asks the Monk to tell the
next tale, but the drunken Miller interrupts and insists that his tale should
be the next. He tells the story of an impoverished student named Nicholas, who
persuades his landlord’s sexy young wife, Alisoun, to spend the night with him.
He convinces his landlord, a carpenter named John, that the second flood is
coming, and tricks him into spending the night in a tub hanging from the
ceiling of his barn. Absolon, a young parish clerk who is also in love with
Alisoun, appears outside the window of the room where Nicholas and Alisoun lie
together. When Absolon begs Alisoun for a kiss, she sticks her rear end out the
window in the dark and lets him kiss it. Absolon runs and gets a red-hot poker,
returns to the window, and asks for another kiss; when Nicholas sticks his
bottom out the window and farts, Absolon brands him on the buttocks. Nicholas’s
cries for water make the carpenter think that the flood has come, so the
carpenter cuts the rope connecting his tub to the ceiling, falls down, and
breaks his arm.
The Reeve’s Prologue and Tale
Because he also does carpentry, the
Reeve takes offense at the Miller’s tale of a stupid carpenter, and counters
with his own tale of a dishonest miller. The Reeve tells the story of two
students, John and Alayn, who go to the mill to watch the miller grind their
corn, so that he won’t have a chance to steal any. But the miller unties their
horse, and while they chase it, he steals some of the flour he has just ground
for them. By the time the students catch the horse, it is dark, so they spend
the night in the miller’s house. That night, Alayn seduces the miller’s
daughter, and John seduces his wife. When the miller wakes up and finds out
what has happened, he tries to beat the students. His wife, thinking that her
husband is actually one of the students, hits the miller over the head with a
staff. The students take back their stolen goods and leave.
The Cook’s Prologue and Tale
The Cook particularly enjoys the
Reeve’s Tale, and offers to tell another funny tale. The tale concerns an
apprentice named Perkyn who drinks and dances so much that he is called “Perkyn
Reveler.” Finally, Perkyn’s master decides that he would rather his apprentice
leave to revel than stay home and corrupt the other servants. Perkyn arranges
to stay with a friend who loves drinking and gambling, and who has a wife who
is a prostitute. The tale breaks off, unfinished, after fifty-eight lines.
The Man of Law’s Introduction, Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue
The Host reminds his fellow pilgrims
to waste no time, because lost time cannot be regained. He asks the Man of Law
to tell the next tale. The Man of Law agrees, apologizing that he cannot tell
any suitable tale that Chaucer has not already told—Chaucer may be unskilled as
a poet, says the Man of Law, but he has told more stories of lovers than Ovid,
and he doesn’t print tales of incest as John Gower does (Gower was a
contemporary of Chaucer). In the Prologue to his tale, the Man of Law laments
the miseries of poverty. He then remarks how fortunate merchants are, and says
that his tale is one told to him by a merchant.
In the tale, the Muslim sultan of
Syria converts his entire sultanate (including himself) to Christianity in
order to persuade the emperor of Rome to give him his daughter, Custance, in
marriage. The sultan’s mother and her attendants remain secretly faithful to
Islam. The mother tells her son she wishes to hold a banquet for him and all
the Christians. At the banquet, she massacres her son and all the Christians
except for Custance, whom she sets adrift in a rudderless ship. After years of
floating, Custance runs ashore in Northumberland, where a constable and his
wife, Hermengyld, offer her shelter. She converts them to Christianity.
One night, Satan makes a young
knight sneak into Hermengyld’s chamber and murder Hermengyld. He places the
bloody knife next to Custance, who sleeps in the same chamber. When the
constable returns home, accompanied by Alla, the king of Northumberland, he
finds his slain wife. He tells Alla the story of how Custance was found, and
Alla begins to pity the girl. He decides to look more deeply into the murder.
Just as the knight who murdered Hermengyld is swearing that Custance is the
true murderer, he is struck down and his eyes burst out of his face, proving
his guilt to Alla and the crowd. The knight is executed, Alla and many others
convert to Christianity, and Custance and Alla marry.
While Alla is away in Scotland,
Custance gives birth to a boy named Mauricius. Alla’s mother, Donegild,
intercepts a letter from Custance to Alla and substitutes a counterfeit one
that claims that the child is disfigured and bewitched. She then intercepts
Alla’s reply, which claims that the child should be kept and loved no matter
how malformed. Donegild substitutes a letter saying that Custance and her son
are banished and should be sent away on the same ship on which Custance
arrived. Alla returns home, finds out what has happened, and kills Donegild.
After many adventures at sea,
including an attempted rape, Custance ends up back in Rome, where she reunites
with Alla, who has made a pilgrimage there to atone for killing his mother. She
also reunites with her father, the emperor. Alla and Custance return to
England, but Alla dies after a year, so Custance returns, once more, to Rome.
Mauricius becomes the next Roman emperor.
Following the Man of Law’s Tale, the
Host asks the Parson to tell the next tale, but the Parson reproaches him for
swearing, and they fall to bickering.
The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale
The Wife of Bath gives a lengthy
account of her feelings about marriage. Quoting from the Bible, the Wife argues
against those who believe it is wrong to marry more than once, and she explains
how she dominated and controlled each of her five husbands. She married her
fifth husband, Jankyn, for love instead of money. After the Wife has rambled on
for a while, the Friar butts in to complain that she is taking too long, and
the Summoner retorts that friars are like flies, always meddling. The Friar
promises to tell a tale about a summoner, and the Summoner promises to tell a
tale about a friar. The Host cries for everyone to quiet down and allow the
Wife to commence her tale.
In her tale, a young knight of King
Arthur’s court rapes a maiden; to atone for his crime, Arthur’s queen sends him
on a quest to discover what women want most. An ugly old woman promises the
knight that she will tell him the secret if he promises to do whatever she
wants for saving his life. He agrees, and she tells him women want control of
their husbands and their own lives. They go together to Arthur’s queen, and the
old woman’s answer turns out to be correct. The old woman then tells the knight
that he must marry her. When the knight confesses later that he is repulsed by
her appearance, she gives him a choice: she can either be ugly and faithful, or
beautiful and unfaithful. The knight tells her to make the choice herself, and
she rewards him for giving her control of the marriage by rendering herself
both beautiful and faithful.
The Friar’s Prologue and Tale
The Friar speaks approvingly of the
Wife of Bath’s Tale, and offers to lighten things up for the company by telling
a funny story about a lecherous summoner. The Summoner does not object, but he
promises to pay the Friar back in his own tale. The Friar tells of an
archdeacon who carries out the law without mercy, especially to lechers. The
archdeacon has a summoner who has a network of spies working for him, to let
him know who has been lecherous. The summoner extorts money from those he’s
sent to summon, charging them more money than he should for penance. He tries
to serve a summons on a yeoman who is actually a devil in disguise. After
comparing notes on their treachery and extortion, the devil vanishes, but when the
summoner tries to prosecute an old wealthy widow unfairly, the widow cries out
that the summoner should be taken to hell. The devil follows the woman’s
instructions and drags the summoner off to hell.
The Summoner’s Prologue and Tale
The Summoner, furious at the Friar’s
Tale, asks the company to let him tell the next tale. First, he tells the
company that there is little difference between friars and fiends, and that
when an angel took a friar down to hell to show him the torments there, the
friar asked why there were no friars in hell; the angel then pulled up Satan’s
tail and 20,000 friars came out of his ass.
In the Summoner’s Tale, a friar begs
for money from a dying man named Thomas and his wife, who have recently lost
their child. The friar shamelessly exploits the couple’s misfortunes to extract
money from them, so Thomas tells the friar that he is sitting on something that
he will bequeath to the friars. The friar reaches for his bequest, and Thomas
lets out an enormous fart. The friar complains to the lord of the manor, whose
squire promises to divide the fart evenly among all the friars.
The Clerk’s Prologue and Tale
The Host asks the Clerk to cheer up
and tell a merry tale, and the Clerk agrees to tell a tale by the Italian poet
Petrarch. Griselde is a hardworking peasant who marries into the aristocracy.
Her husband tests her fortitude in several ways, including pretending to kill
her children and divorcing her. He punishes her one final time by forcing her
to prepare for his wedding to a new wife. She does all this dutifully, her
husband tells her that she has always been and will always be his wife (the
divorce was a fraud), and they live happily ever after.
The Merchant’s Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue
The Merchant reflects on the great
difference between the patient Griselde of the Clerk’s Tale and the horrible
shrew he has been married to for the past two months. The Host asks him to tell
a story of the evils of marriage, and he complies. Against the advice of his
friends, an old knight named January marries May, a beautiful young woman. She
is less than impressed by his enthusiastic sexual efforts, and conspires to
cheat on him with his squire, Damien. When blind January takes May into his
garden to copulate with her, she tells him she wants to eat a pear, and he
helps her up into the pear tree, where she has sex with Damien. Pluto, the king
of the faeries, restores January’s sight, but May, caught in the act, assures
him that he must still be blind. The Host prays to God to keep him from marrying
a wife like the one the Merchant describes.
The Squire’s Introduction and Tale
The Host calls upon the Squire to
say something about his favorite subject, love, and the Squire willingly
complies. King Cambyuskan of the Mongol Empire is visited on his birthday by a
knight bearing gifts from the king of Arabia and India. He gives Cambyuskan and
his daughter Canacee a magic brass horse, a magic mirror, a magic ring that
gives Canacee the ability to understand the language of birds, and a sword with
the power to cure any wound it creates. She rescues a dying female falcon that
narrates how her consort abandoned her for the love of another. The Squire’s
Tale is either unfinished by Chaucer or is meant to be interrupted by the
Franklin, who interjects that he wishes his own son were as eloquent as the
Squire. The Host expresses annoyance at the Franklin’s interruption, and orders
him to begin the next tale.
The Franklin’s Prologue and Tale
The Franklin says that his tale is a
familiar Breton lay, a folk ballad of ancient Brittany. Dorigen, the heroine,
awaits the return of her husband, Arveragus, who has gone to England to win
honor in feats of arms. She worries that the ship bringing her husband home
will wreck itself on the coastal rocks, and she promises Aurelius, a young man
who falls in love with her, that she will give her body to him if he clears the
rocks from the coast. Aurelius hires a student learned in magic to create the
illusion that the rocks have disappeared. Arveragus returns home and tells his wife
that she must keep her promise to Aurelius. Aurelius is so impressed by
Arveragus’s honorable act that he generously absolves her of the promise, and
the magician, in turn, generously absolves Aurelius of the money he owes.
The Physician’s Tale
Appius the judge lusts after
Virginia, the beautiful daughter of Virginius. Appius persuades a churl named
Claudius to declare her his slave, stolen from him by Virginius. Appius
declares that Virginius must hand over his daughter to Claudius. Virginius
tells his daughter that she must die rather than suffer dishonor, and she
virtuously consents to her father’s cutting her head off. Appius sentences
Virginius to death, but the Roman people, aware of Appius’s hijinks, throw him
into prison, where he kills himself.
The Pardoner’s Introduction, Prologue, and Tale
The Host is dismayed by the tragic
injustice of the Physician’s Tale, and asks the Pardoner to tell something
merry. The other pilgrims contradict the Host, demanding a moral tale, which
the Pardoner agrees to tell after he eats and drinks. The Pardoner tells the
company how he cheats people out of their money by preaching that money is the
root of all evil. His tale describes three riotous youths who go looking for
Death, thinking that they can kill him. An old man tells them that they will
find Death under a tree. Instead, they find eight bushels of gold, which they
plot to sneak into town under cover of darkness. The youngest goes into town to
fetch food and drink, but brings back poison, hoping to have the gold all to
himself. His companions kill him to enrich their own shares, then drink the
poison and die under the tree. His tale complete, the Pardoner offers to sell
the pilgrims pardons, and singles out the Host to come kiss his relics. The
Host infuriates the Pardoner by accusing him of fraud, but the Knight persuades
the two to kiss and bury their differences.
The Shipman’s Tale
The Shipman’s Tale features a monk
who tricks a merchant’s wife into having sex with him by borrowing money from
the merchant, then giving it to the wife so she can repay her own debt to her
husband, in exchange for sexual favors. When the monk sees the merchant next,
he tells him that he returned the merchant’s money to his wife. The wife
realizes she has been duped, but she boldly tells her husband to forgive her
debt: she will repay it in bed. The Host praises the Shipman’s story, and asks
the Prioress for a tale.
The Prioress’s Prologue and Tale
The Prioress calls on the Virgin
Mary to guide her tale. In an Asian city, a Christian school is located at the
edge of a Jewish ghetto. An angelic seven-year-old boy, a widow’s son, attends
the school. He is a devout Christian, and loves to sing Alma Redemptoris (Gracious Mother of the Redeemer).
Singing the song on his way through the ghetto, some Jews hire a murderer to
slit his throat and throw him into a latrine. The Jews refuse to tell the widow
where her son is, but he miraculously begins to sing Alma Redemptoris, so the Christian people recover
his body, and the magistrate orders the murdering Jews to be drawn apart by
wild horses and then hanged.
The Prologue and Tale of Sir Thopas
The Host, after teasing Chaucer the
narrator about his appearance, asks him to tell a tale. Chaucer says that he
only knows one tale, then launches into a parody of bad poetry—the Tale of Sir
Thopas. Sir Thopas rides about looking for an elf-queen to marry until he is
confronted by a giant. The narrator’s doggerel continues in this vein until the
Host can bear no more and interrupts him. Chaucer asks him why he can’t tell
his tale, since it is the best he knows, and the Host explains that his rhyme
isn’t worth a turd. He encourages Chaucer to tell a prose tale.
The Tale of Melibee
Chaucer’s second tale is the long,
moral prose story of Melibee. Melibee’s house is raided by his foes, who beat
his wife, Prudence, and severely wound his daughter, Sophie, in her feet,
hands, ears, nose, and mouth. Prudence advises him not to rashly pursue
vengeance on his enemies, and he follows her advice, putting his foes’ punishment
in her hands. She forgives them for the outrages done to her, in a model of
Christian forbearance and forgiveness.
The Monk’s Prologue and Tale
The Host wishes that his own wife
were as patient as Melibee’s, and calls upon the Monk to tell the next tale.
First he teases the Monk, pointing out that the Monk is clearly no poor
cloisterer. The Monk takes it all in stride and tells a series of tragic falls,
in which noble figures are brought low: Lucifer, Adam, Sampson, Hercules,
Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Zenobia, Pedro of Castile, and down through the
ages.
The Nun’s Priest’s Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue
After seventeen noble “falls”
narrated by the Monk, the Knight interrupts, and the Host calls upon the Nun’s
Priest to deliver something more lively. The Nun’s Priest tells of Chanticleer
the Rooster, who is carried off by a flattering fox who tricks him into closing
his eyes and displaying his crowing abilities. Chanticleer turns the tables on
the fox by persuading him to open his mouth and brag to the barnyard about his
feat, upon which Chanticleer falls out of the fox’s mouth and escapes. The Host
praises the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, adding that if the Nun’s Priest were not in
holy orders, he would be as sexually potent as Chanticleer.
The Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale
In her Prologue, the Second Nun
explains that she will tell a saint’s life, that of Saint Cecilia, for this
saint set an excellent example through her good works and wise teachings. She
focuses particularly on the story of Saint Cecilia’s martyrdom. Before
Cecilia’s new husband, Valerian, can take her virginity, she sends him on a
pilgrimage to Pope Urban, who converts him to Christianity. An angel visits
Valerian, who asks that his brother Tiburce be granted the grace of Christian
conversion as well. All three—Cecilia, Tiburce, and Valerian—are put to death
by the Romans.
The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale
When the Second Nun’s Tale is
finished, the company is overtaken by a black-clad Canon and his Yeoman, who
have heard of the pilgrims and their tales and wish to participate. The Yeoman
brags to the company about how he and the Canon create the illusion that they
are alchemists, and the Canon departs in shame at having his secrets
discovered. The Yeoman tells a tale of how a canon defrauded a priest by
creating the illusion of alchemy using sleight of hand.
The Manciple’s Prologue and Tale
The Host pokes fun at the Cook,
riding at the back of the company, blind drunk. The Cook is unable to honor the
Host’s request that he tell a tale, and the Manciple criticizes him for his
drunkenness. The Manciple relates the legend of a white crow, taken from the
Roman poet Ovid’sMetamorphoses and
one of the tales in The
Arabian Nights. In it,
Phoebus’s talking white crow informs him that his wife is cheating on him.
Phoebus kills the wife, pulls out the crow’s white feathers, and curses it with
blackness.
The Parson’s Prologue and Tale
As the company enters a village in
the late afternoon, the Host calls upon the Parson to give them a fable.
Refusing to tell a fictional story because it would go against the rule set by
St. Paul, the Parson delivers a lengthy treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins,
instead.
Chaucer’s Retraction
Chaucer appeals to readers to credit
Jesus Christ as the inspiration for anything in his book that they like, and to
attribute what they don’t like to his own ignorance and lack of ability. He
retracts and prays for forgiveness for all of his works dealing with secular
and pagan subjects, asking only to be remembered for what he has written of
saints’ lives and homilies.
Analysis of Major Characters
The Knight
The Knight rides at the front of the
procession described in the General Prologue, and his story is the first in the
sequence. The Host clearly admires the Knight, as does the narrator. The
narrator seems to remember four main qualities of the Knight. The first is the
Knight’s love of ideals—“chivalrie” (prowess), “trouthe” (fidelity), “honour”
(reputation), “fredom” (generosity), and “curteisie” (refinement) (General
Prologue, 45–46). The second is the Knight’s impressive military career. The
Knight has fought in the Crusades, wars in which Europeans traveled by sea to
non-Christian lands and attempted to convert whole cultures by the force of
their swords. By Chaucer’s time, the spirit for conducting these wars was dying
out, and they were no longer undertaken as frequently. The Knight has battled
the Muslims in Egypt, Spain, and Turkey, and the Russian Orthodox in Lithuania
and Russia. He has also fought in formal duels. The third quality the narrator
remembers about the Knight is his meek, gentle, manner. And the fourth is his
“array,” or dress. The Knight wears a tunic made of coarse cloth, and his coat
of mail is rust-stained, because he has recently returned from an expedition.
The Knight’s interaction with other
characters tells us a few additional facts about him. In the Prologue to the
Nun’s Priest’s Tale, he calls out to hear something more lighthearted, saying
that it deeply upsets him to hear stories about tragic falls. He would rather
hear about “joye and greet solas,” about men who start off in poverty climbing
in fortune and attaining wealth (Nun’s Priest’s Prologue, 2774). The Host
agrees with him, which is not surprising, since the Host has mentioned that
whoever tells the tale of “best sentence and moost solaas” will win the
storytelling contest (General Prologue, 798). And, at the end of the Pardoner’s
Tale, the Knight breaks in to stop the squabbling between the Host and the
Pardoner, ordering them to kiss and make up. Ironically, though a soldier, the
romantic, idealistic Knight clearly has an aversion to conflict or unhappiness
of any sort.
The Pardoner
The Pardoner rides in the very back
of the party in the General Prologue and is fittingly the most marginalized character
in the company. His profession is somewhat dubious—pardoners offered
indulgences, or previously written pardons for particular sins, to people who
repented of the sin they had committed. Along with receiving the indulgence,
the penitent would make a donation to the Church by giving money to the
pardoner. Eventually, this “charitable” donation became a necessary part of
receiving an indulgence. Paid by the Church to offer these indulgences, the
Pardoner was not supposed to pocket the penitents’ charitable donations. That
said, the practice of offering indulgences came under critique by quite a few
churchmen, since once the charitable donation became a practice allied to
receiving an indulgence, it began to look like one could cleanse oneself of sin
by simply paying off the Church. Additionally, widespread suspicion held that
pardoners counterfeited the pope’s signature on illegitimate indulgences and
pocketed the “charitable donations” themselves.
Chaucer’s Pardoner is a highly
untrustworthy character. He sings a ballad—“Com hider, love, to me!” (General
Prologue, 672)—with the hypocritical Summoner, undermining the already
challenged virtue of his profession as one who works for the Church. He
presents himself as someone of ambiguous gender and sexual orientation, further
challenging social norms. The narrator is not sure whether the Pardoner is an
effeminate homosexual or a eunuch (castrated male). Like the other pilgrims,
the Pardoner carries with him to Canterbury the tools of his trade—in his case,
freshly signed papal indulgences and a sack of false relics, including a brass
cross filled with stones to make it seem as heavy as gold and a glass jar full
of pig’s bones, which he passes off as saints’ relics. Since visiting relics on
pilgrimage had become a tourist industry, the Pardoner wants to cash in on
religion in any way he can, and he does this by selling tangible, material
objects—whether slips of paper that promise forgiveness of sins or animal bones
that people can string around their necks as charms against the devil. After
telling the group how he gulls people into indulging his own avarice through a
sermon he preaches on greed, the Pardoner tells of a tale that exemplifies the
vice decried in his sermon. Furthermore, he attempts to sell pardons to the
group—in effect plying his trade in clear violation of the rules outlined by
the host.
The Wife of Bath
One of two female storytellers (the
other is the Prioress), the Wife has a lot of experience under her belt. She
has traveled all over the world on pilgrimages, so Canterbury is a jaunt
compared to other perilous journeys she has endured. Not only has she seen many
lands, she has lived with five husbands. She is worldly in both senses of the
word: she has seen the world and has experience in the ways of the world, that
is, in love and sex.
Rich and tasteful, the Wife’s
clothes veer a bit toward extravagance: her face is wreathed in heavy cloth,
her stockings are a fine scarlet color, and the leather on her shoes is soft,
fresh, and brand new—all of which demonstrate how wealthy she has become.
Scarlet was a particularly costly dye, since it was made from individual red
beetles found only in some parts of the world. The fact that she hails from
Bath, a major English cloth-making town in the Middle Ages, is reflected in
both her talent as a seamstress and her stylish garments. Bath at this time was
fighting for a place among the great European exporters of cloth, which were
mostly in the Netherlands and Belgium. So the fact that the Wife’s sewing surpasses
that of the cloth makers of “Ipres and of Gaunt” (Ypres and Ghent) speaks well
of Bath’s (and England’s) attempt to outdo its overseas competitors.
Although she is argumentative and
enjoys talking, the Wife is intelligent in a commonsense, rather than
intellectual, way. Through her experiences with her husbands, she has learned
how to provide for herself in a world where women had little independence or
power. The chief manner in which she has gained control over her husbands has
been in her control over their use of her body. The Wife uses her body as a
bargaining tool, withholding sexual pleasure until her husbands give her what
she demands.
Themes, Motifs & Symbols
Themes
Themes are
the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
The Pervasiveness of Courtly Love
The phrase “courtly love” refers to
a set of ideas about love that was enormously influential on the literature and
culture of the Middle Ages. Beginning with the Troubadour poets of southern
France in the eleventh century, poets throughout Europe promoted the notions
that true love only exists outside of marriage; that true love may be idealized
and spiritual, and may exist without ever being physically consummated; and
that a man becomes the servant of the lady he loves. Together with these basic
premises, courtly love encompassed a number of minor motifs. One of these is
the idea that love is a torment or a disease, and that when a man is in love he
cannot sleep or eat, and therefore he undergoes physical changes, sometimes to
the point of becoming unrecognizable. Although very few people’s lives
resembled the courtly love ideal in any way, these themes and motifs were
extremely popular and widespread in medieval and Renaissance literature and
culture. They were particularly popular in the literature and culture that were
part of royal and noble courts.
Courtly love motifs first appear in The Canterbury Tales with the description of the Squire in
the General Prologue. The Squire’s role in society is exactly that of his
father the Knight, except for his lower status, but the Squire is very
different from his father in that he incorporates the ideals of courtly love
into his interpretation of his own role. Indeed, the Squire is practically a
parody of the traditional courtly lover. The description of the Squire
establishes a pattern that runs throughout the General Prologue, and The Canterbury Tales:
characters whose roles are defined by their religious or economic functions
integrate the cultural ideals of courtly love into their dress, their behavior,
and the tales they tell, in order to give a slightly different twist to their
roles. Another such character is the Prioress, a nun who sports a “Love
Conquers All” brooch.
The Importance of Company
Many of Chaucer’s characters end
their stories by wishing the rest of the “compaignye,” or company, well. The
Knight ends with “God save al this faire compaignye” (3108), and the Reeve with
“God, that sitteth heighe in magestee, / Save al this compaignye, grete and
smale!” (4322–4323). Company literally signifies the entire group of people,
but Chaucer’s deliberate choice of this word over other words for describing
masses of people, like the Middle English words for party, mixture, or group,
points us to another major theme that runs throughout The Canterbury Tales. Company
derives from two Latin words, com, or “with,” and pane, or “bread.” Quite literally, a
company is a group of people with whom one eats, or breaks bread. The word for
good friend, or “companion,” also comes from these words. But, in a more
abstract sense, company had an economic connotation. It was the term designated
to connote a group of people engaged in a particular business, as it is used
today.
The functioning and well-being of
medieval communities, not to mention their overall happiness, depended upon
groups of socially bonded workers in towns and guilds, known informally as
companies. If workers in a guild or on a feudal manor were not getting along
well, they would not produce good work, and the economy would suffer. They
would be unable to bargain, as a modern union does, for better working
conditions and life benefits. Eating together was a way for guild members to
cement friendships, creating a support structure for their working community.
Guilds had their own special dining halls, where social groups got together to
bond, be merry, and form supportive alliances. When the peasants revolted
against their feudal lords in 1381, they were able to organize themselves well
precisely because they had formed these strong social ties through their
companies.
Company was a leveling concept—an
idea created by the working classes that gave them more power and took away
some of the nobility’s power and tyranny. The company of pilgrims on the way to
Canterbury is not a typical example of a tightly networked company, although
the five Guildsmen do represent this kind of fraternal union. The pilgrims come
from different parts of society—the court, the Church, villages, the feudal
manor system. To prevent discord, the pilgrims create an informal company,
united by their jobs as storytellers, and by the food and drink the host
provides. As far as class distinctions are concerned, they do form a company in
the sense that none of them belongs to the nobility, and most have working
professions, whether that work be sewing and marriage (the Wife of Bath),
entertaining visitors with gourmet food (the Franklin), or tilling the earth
(the Plowman).
The Corruption of the Church
By the late fourteenth century, the
Catholic Church, which governed England, Ireland, and the entire continent of
Europe, had become extremely wealthy. The cathedrals that grew up around
shrines to saints’ relics were incredibly expensive to build, and the amount of
gold that went into decorating them and equipping them with candlesticks and
reliquaries (boxes to hold relics that were more jewel-encrusted than kings’
crowns) surpassed the riches in the nobles’ coffers. In a century of disease,
plague, famine, and scarce labor, the sight of a church ornamented with unused
gold seemed unfair to some people, and the Church’s preaching against greed
suddenly seemed hypocritical, considering its great displays of material
wealth. Distaste for the excesses of the Church triggered stories and anecdotes
about greedy, irreligious churchmen who accepted bribes, bribed others, and
indulged themselves sensually and gastronomically, while ignoring the poor
famished peasants begging at their doors.
The religious figures Chaucer
represents inThe Canterbury Tales all
deviate in one way or another from what was traditionally expected of them.
Generally, their conduct corresponds to common medieval stereotypes, but it is
difficult to make any overall statement about Chaucer’s position because his
narrator is so clearly biased toward some characters—the Monk, for example—and
so clearly biased against others, such as the Pardoner. Additionally, the
characters are not simply satirical versions of their roles; they are
individuals and cannot simply be taken as typical of their professions.
The Monk, Prioress, and Friar were
all members of the clerical estate. The Monk and the Prioress live in a
monastery and a convent, respectively. Both are characterized as figures who
seem to prefer the aristocratic to the devotional life. The Prioress’s
bejeweled rosary seems more like a love token than something expressing her
devotion to Christ, and her dainty mannerisms echo the advice given by
Guillaume de Loris in the French romance Roman
de la Rose, about how women
could make themselves attractive to men. The Monk enjoys hunting, a pastime of
the nobility, while he disdains study and confinement. The Friar was a member
of an order of mendicants, who made their living by traveling around and
begging, and accepting money to hear confession. Friars were often seen as
threatening and had the reputation of being lecherous, as the Wife of Bath
describes in the opening of her tale. The Summoner and the Friar are at each
other’s throats so frequently in The
Canterbury Tales because they
were in fierce competition in Chaucer’s time—summoners, too, extorted money
from people.
Overall, the narrator seems to
harbor much more hostility for the ecclesiastical officials (the Summoner and
the Pardoner) than he does for the clerics. For example, the Monk and the Pardoner
possess several traits in common, but the narrator presents them in very
different ways. The narrator remembers the shiny baldness of the Monk’s head,
which suggests that the Monk may have ridden without a hood, but the narrator
uses the fact that the Pardoner rides without a hood as proof of his shallow
character. The Monk and the Pardoner both give their own opinions of themselves
to the narrator—the narrator affirms the Monk’s words by repeating them, and
his own response, but the narrator mocks the Pardoner for his opinion of
himself.
Motifs
Motifs are
recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop
and inform the text’s major themes.
Romance
The romance, a tale about knights
and ladies incorporating courtly love themes, was a popular literary genre in
fourteenth-century literature. The genre included tales of knights rescuing
maidens, embarking on quests, and forming bonds with other knights and rulers
(kings and queens). In particular, the romances about King Arthur, his queen,
Guinevere, and his society of “knights of the round table” were very popular in
England. In The Canterbury
Tales, the Knight’s Tale
incorporates romantic elements in an ancient classical setting, which is a
somewhat unusual time and place to set a romance. The Wife of Bath’s Tale is
framed by Arthurian romance, with an unnamed knight of the round table as its
unlikely hero, but the tale itself becomes a proto-feminist’s moral instruction
for domestic behavior. The Miller’s Tale ridicules the traditional elements of
romance by transforming the love between a young wooer and a willing maiden
into a boisterous and violent romp.
Fabliaux
Fabliaux were comical and often
grotesque stories in which the characters most often succeed by means of their sharp
wits. Such stories were popular in France and Italy in the fourteenth century.
Frequently, the plot turns or climaxes around the most grotesque feature in the
story, usually a bodily noise or function. The Miller’s Tale is a prime
experiment with this motif: Nicholas cleverly tricks the carpenter into
spending the night in his barn so that Nicholas can sleep with the carpenter’s
wife; the finale occurs when Nicholas farts in Absolon’s face, only to be
burned with a hot poker on his rear end. In the Summoner’s Tale, a wealthy man
bequeaths a corrupt friar an enormous fart, which the friar divides twelve ways
among his brethren. This demonstrates another invention around this motif—that
of wittily expanding a grotesque image in an unconventional way. In the case of
the Summoner’s Tale, the image is of flatulence, but the tale excels in
discussing the division of the fart in a highly intellectual (and quite
hilarious) manner.
Symbols
Symbols are
objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or
concepts.
Springtime
The Canterbury Tales opens in April, at the height of
spring. The birds are chirping, the flowers blossoming, and people long in
their hearts to go on pilgrimages, which combine travel, vacation, and
spiritual renewal. The springtime symbolizes rebirth and fresh beginnings, and
is thus appropriate for the beginning of Chaucer’s text. Springtime also evokes
erotic love, as evidenced by the moment when Palamon first sees Emelye
gathering fresh flowers to make garlands in honor of May. The Squire, too,
participates in this symbolism. His devotion to courtly love is compared to the
freshness of the month of May.
Clothing
In the General Prologue, the
description of garments, in addition to the narrator’s own shaky recollections,
helps to define each character. In a sense, the clothes symbolize what lies
beneath the surface of each personality. The Physician’s love of wealth reveals
itself most clearly to us in the rich silk and fur of his gown. The Squire’s
youthful vanity is symbolized by the excessive floral brocade on his tunic. The
Merchant’s forked beard could symbolize his duplicity, at which Chaucer only
hints.
Physiognomy
Physiognomy was a science that
judged a person’s temperament and character based on his or her anatomy.
Physiognomy plays a significant role in Chaucer’s descriptions of the pilgrims
in the General Prologue. The most exaggerated facial features are those of the
peasants. The Miller represents the stereotypical peasant physiognomy most
clearly: round and ruddy, with a wart on his nose, the Miller appears rough and
therefore suited to rough, simple work. The Pardoner’s glaring eyes and limp
hair illustrate his fraudulence.
General Prologue: Introduction
Fragment
1, lines 1–42
Summary
Whan
that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote . . .
The narrator opens the General
Prologue with a description of the return of spring. He describes the April
rains, the burgeoning flowers and leaves, and the chirping birds. Around this
time of year, the narrator says, people begin to feel the desire to go on a
pilgrimage. Many devout English pilgrims set off to visit shrines in distant
holy lands, but even more choose to travel to Canterbury to visit the relics of
Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, where they thank the martyr for
having helped them when they were in need. The narrator tells us that as he
prepared to go on such a pilgrimage, staying at a tavern in Southwark called
the Tabard Inn, a great company of twenty-nine travelers entered. The travelers
were a diverse group who, like the narrator, were on their way to Canterbury.
They happily agreed to let him join them. That night, the group slept at the
Tabard, and woke up early the next morning to set off on their journey. Before
continuing the tale, the narrator declares his intent to list and describe each
of the members of the group.
Analysis
The invocation of spring with which
the General Prologue begins is lengthy and formal compared to the language of
the rest of the Prologue. The first lines situate the story in a particular
time and place, but the speaker does this in cosmic and cyclical terms,
celebrating the vitality and richness of spring. This approach gives the
opening lines a dreamy, timeless, unfocused quality, and it is therefore
surprising when the narrator reveals that he’s going to describe a pilgrimage
that he himself took rather than telling a love story. A pilgrimage is a
religious journey undertaken for penance and grace. As pilgrimages went,
Canterbury was not a very difficult destination for an English person to reach.
It was, therefore, very popular in fourteenth-century England, as the narrator
mentions. Pilgrims traveled to visit the remains of Saint Thomas Becket,
archbishop of Canterbury, who was murdered in 1170 by knights of King Henry II.
Soon after his death, he became the most popular saint in England. The
pilgrimage in The Canterbury
Tales should not be thought
of as an entirely solemn occasion, because it also offered the pilgrims an
opportunity to abandon work and take a vacation.
In line 20, the narrator abandons
his unfocused, all-knowing point of view, identifying himself as an actual
person for the first time by inserting the first person—“I”—as he relates how
he met the group of pilgrims while staying at the Tabard Inn. He emphasizes
that this group, which he encountered by accident, was itself formed quite by
chance (25–26). He then shifts into the first-person plural, referring to the
pilgrims as “we” beginning in line 29, asserting his status as a member of the
group.
The narrator ends the introductory
portion of his prologue by noting that he has “tyme and space” to tell his
narrative. His comments underscore the fact that he is writing some time after
the events of his story, and that he is describing the characters from memory.
He has spoken and met with these people, but he has waited a certain length of
time before sitting down and describing them. His intention to describe each
pilgrim as he or sheseemed to
him is also important, for it emphasizes that his descriptions are not only
subject to his memory but are also shaped by his individual perceptions and
opinions regarding each of the characters. He positions himself as a mediator
between two groups: the group of pilgrims, of which he was a member, and us,
the audience, whom the narrator explicitly addresses as “you” in lines 34 and
38.
On the other hand, the narrator’s
declaration that he will tell us about the “condicioun,” “degree,” and “array”
(dress) of each of the pilgrims suggests that his portraits will be based on
objective facts as well as his own opinions. He spends considerable time
characterizing the group members according to their social positions. The
pilgrims represent a diverse cross section of fourteenth-century English
society. Medieval social theory divided society into three broad classes,
called “estates”: the military, the clergy, and the laity. (The nobility, not
represented in the General Prologue, traditionally derives its title and
privileges from military duties and service, so it is considered part of the
military estate.) In the portraits that we will see in the rest of the General
Prologue, the Knight and Squire represent the military estate. The clergy is
represented by the Prioress (and her nun and three priests), the Monk, the
Friar, and the Parson. The other characters, from the wealthy Franklin to the
poor Plowman, are the members of the laity. These lay characters can be further
subdivided into landowners (the Franklin), professionals (the Clerk, the Man of
Law, the Guildsmen, the Physician, and the Shipman), laborers (the Cook and the
Plowman), stewards (the Miller, the Manciple, and the Reeve), and church
officers (the Summoner and the Pardoner). As we will see, Chaucer’s
descriptions of the various characters and their social roles reveal the
influence of the medieval genre of estates satire.
