The Canterbury Tales

“He who repeats a tale after a man/Is bound to say, as nearly as he can,/Each single word, if he remembers it,/However rudely spoken or unfit,/Or else the tale he tells will be untrue,/The things pretended and the phrases new./He may not flinch although it were his brother,/He may as well say one word as another./And Christ Himself spoke broad in Holy Writ,/Yet there is no scurrility in it,/And Plato says, for those with power to read,/‘The word should be as cousin to the deed.’” 

In this tongue-in-cheek passage, Chaucer justifies recounting the pilgrim’s stories—rudeness, lewdness, and all—with examples both Biblical and classical. There’s humor here, but also a serious point. Chaucer is attempting to capture how people really are, and he’s not going to leave anything out. There’s a further hint of mischief in the phrase “if he remembers it”: Perhaps even this “accurate” portrayal will employ a touch of artistic license.

“Immediately an uproar was begun/Over this granted boon in Heaven above/As between Venus, fairest Queen of Love,/And the armipotent Mars; it did not cease,/Though Jupiter was busy making peace,/Until their father Saturn, pale and cold,/Who knew so many stratagems of old,/Searched his experience and found an art/To please the disputants on either part.” (“The Knight’s Tale,” 

After the high drama of the three would-be lovers’ visits to the gods’ temples in “The Knight’s Tale,” the Knight comically deflates the tension with this petty squabble between Venus and Mars who have promised their petitioners conflicting boons. In this vision of the world—chivalrous and romantic though it is—everyone ultimately is human—even the gods. There’s a feeling of potential confusion between Chaucer and the Knight here as they share a sense of humor.

“Dark was the night as pitch, as black as coal,/And at the window out she put her hole,/And Absalon, so fortune framed the farce,/Put up his mouth and kissed her naked arse/Most savorously before he knew of this./And back he started. Something was amiss;/He knew quite well a woman has no beard,/Yet something rough and hairy had appeared.” 

The Miller’s outrageous story blows raspberries—sometimes literally—at the Knight’s tale of eternal courtly loves. This tale parallels the Knight’s in many respects—with its two young men vying for a fair lady’s love—but casts it in the rudest, earthiest terms possible. All that romance, the Miller suggests, comes down to what people do with their hairier parts.

“‘A room?’ the miller said. ‘There isn’t any./There’s this, such as it is; we’ll share it then./My house is small, but you are learned men/And by your arguments can make a place/Twenty foot broad as infinite as space./Take a look round and see if it will do,/Or make it bigger with your parley-voo.’” 

In his riposte to the Miller, the Reeve works in a few digs at all kinds of people. He may be avenging himself on the coarse Miller, but his story is just as bawdy, and also takes this swing at the fruitless philosophizing of Cambridge scholars. In both these tales, the base material world and its good old-fashioned trickery always win over the intellectual.

“There was a prentice living in our town/Worked in the victualling trade, and he was brown,/Brown as a berry; spruce and short he stood,/As gallant as a goldfinch in the wood./Black were his locks and combed with fetching skill;/He danced so merrily, with such a will,/That he was known as Revelling [sic] Peterkin./He was as full of love, as full of sin/As hives are full of honey, and as sweet.” 

This introduction to the roguish protagonist of the Cook’s unfinished tale is a good example of how many of the tales start with a vivid word-picture of the characters. In this, each individual tale begins to feel like a microcosm of the overarching tale. Just as Chaucer introduces his lively cast of characters in the Prologue, the characters go on to introduce their characters, creating an involuted world of story. The Cook’s description of “Revelling [sic] Peterkin” feels folkloric: This is the very figure of the handsome young rascal, as much a natural part of the world as a berry or a goldfinch.

“And if not murdered at the feast, what law/Kept Constance then from drowning in the sea?/And who kept Jonah in the fish’s maw/Till he was spouted up at Nineveh?/It was none other, certainly, than He/Who kept the Hebrew folk from being drowned,/Crossing the sea dry-footed, safe and sound.” 

The Man of Law’s tale, with its contrasts between the pure and virtuous Constance and her series of wicked mothers-in-law, reads like a sour commentary on womanhood at large. It also, however, takes in a bit of awe and grandeur. Constance’s safe passage over dangerous oceans is written in terms that echo God’s reply to Job.

“You’ve many slacker debtors than myself!/I’ll pay you readily, and as for pelf,/If that should fail, from sunset to revally/I am your wife, so score it on my tally.”

The retort of the merchant’s wife to her angry husband makes a filthy pun on “tally” (which, in Chaucer’s English, was spelled the same as the word for “tail”). In the Shipman’s story, all is merchandise, including “tail,” and the language of “tales” is as slippery and duplicitous as the merchant’s wife. This story, set in France, fits into the tradition of bawdy French fabliaux. Coming after the tediously virtuous Man of Law’s tale, the Shipman’s Tale, with its cheating monk and cheating wife, provides a counterpoint to the Man of Law’s ideals of womanhood and religiosity both.

“‘Through to the bone my neck is cut, I know,’/Answered the child; ‘and had I been confined/By natural law I should, and long ago,/Have died. But Christ, whose glory you may find/In books, wills it be also kept in mind./So for the honour of his mother dear/I still may sing O Alma loud and clear.’” 

The Prioress’s Tale is a heady combination of gore, miracle, and strangeness, topped with violent antisemitism. The story the Prioress tells falls into a familiar pattern of Marian martyrology, but the relish with which she records the details here—aside from the slit throat, she spends a few lines noting into exactly what kind of a sewer the child’s body was thrown—suggests some sharp fangs beneath her genteel exterior. The unforgettable image of the singing child-corpse is a concentrated dose of medieval folk Christianity.

“It has been told again and yet again/By various writers; but I may explain/No one Evangelist would have sufficed/To tell us of the pains of Jesus Christ./Nor does each tell it as the others do;/Nevertheless what each has said is true,/And all agree as to their general sense,/Though each with some degree of difference.” 

Chaucer takes the Host’s rejection of his tale of Sir Topaz as a prime opportunity to expound on the nature of storytelling. Here, Chaucer seems to suggest that retellings of old stories from different perspectives has a moral value, presenting a fuller, richer, and more truthful picture than a story from one perspective alone. The implications for the Canterbury Tales proper are obvious.

“The other children thought it must be hunger/That made him bite upon his arm, not pain. ‘Ah father, don’t, don’t do it!’ cried the younger,/’But rather eat the flesh upon us twain;/Our flesh you gave us, take it back again/And eat enough!’ Thus both the children cried,/But in a day or two, their grief in vain,/They crept into his lap and there they died.” 

In his interminable tragic tales of fallen kings and princes, the Monk displays a wealth of learning. Here—as he later acknowledges—he’s almost directly quoting Dante, right down to the image of Ugolino biting his hands in rage and grief (and his children offering their bodies as food). Chaucer’s debt to Dante appears in the choral form of the Canterbury Tales as well as in this obvious mimicry: Dante, too, speaks through a plethora of his contemporaries during his own pilgrimage in the Divine Comedy.

“Ask any scholar of discerning;/He’ll say the Schools are filled with altercation/On this vexed matter of predestination/Long bandied by a hundred thousand men./How can I sift it to the bottom then?/The Holy Doctor St Augustine shines/In this, and there is Bishop Brandwardine’s/Authority, Boethius’ too, decreeing/Whether the fact of God’s divine foreseeing/Constrains me to perform a certain act/—And by ‘constraint’ I mean the simple fact/Of mere compulsion by necessity—/Or whether a free choice is granted me/To do a given act or not to do it/Though, ere it were accomplished, God foreknew it,/Or whether Providence is not so stringent/And merely makes necessity contingent./But I decline discussion of the matter;/My tale is of a cock and of the clatter/That came of following his wife’s advice…”

The Nun’s Priest, following the heavy going of the Monk’s fateful tales, comically interweaves a very real medieval theological debate with a farmyard tale of Chanticleer and Pertelote. This excursion is sly and witty, but also makes a serious point. These theological matters, the Nun’s Priest suggests, are genuine parts of daily life, not merely sites to show off one’s learning (as they seem to be for the Monk). 

“And when Virginius, that excellent knight,/Had understood the judge’s doom aright/And knew his daughter, on compulsion, must/Be handed over to the judge’s lust,/Home he returned and seated in his hall/He sent a servant, bidding him to call/His daughter to him, and with ashen face/Deathly and cold, gazed on her lowly grace./Fatherly pity pierced him to the heart/And yet he did not falter in his part.” 

The Physician tells a rather prurient tale---in the guise of a morality play—in which a beautiful maiden agrees to be beheaded rather than lose her virtue. But even here, there’s a hint of humanity. This description of Virginius’s face as he confronts his unwitting child adds genuine paternal feeling to what is otherwise a stark and idealized story. 

“But let me briefly make my purpose plain;/I preach for nothing but for greed of gain/And use the same old text, as bold as brass,/Radix malorum est cupiditas./And thus I preach against the very vice/I make my living out of—avarice.”

The Pardoner is so far from attempting to conceal his hypocritical doings that he spends his whole prologue bragging of his dishonesty, then turns around and tries to work the very tricks he describes on his listening audience. The Pardoner is one of Chaucer’s most acidic critiques of contemporary religious corruption. The trade in indulgences (blanket, no-confession-needed religious pardons) and fake relics—the Pardoner’s bread and butter—was all too real. There’s plenty of irony bound up in his favorite saying, Radix malorum est cupiditas—that is, greed is the root of evil.

“For take my word for it, there is no libel/On women that the clergy will not paint,/Except when writing of a woman-saint./By God, if women had but written stores/Like those the clergy keep in oratories,/More had been written of man’s wickedness/Than all the sons of Adam could redress.”

The Wife of Bath’s tale is a refreshing rejoinder to all the stories of virtuous or vicious womanhood the men tell. Her reports of her many husbands are lusty and down-to-earth, but also supported with an impressive wealth of scholarship; when she gets around to telling her tale beyond than the lengthy life-story she presents in her prologue, she learnedly quotes Dante and the Bible. Here, her retort to her fifth husband’s book of bad wives demonstrates both smarts and plain old fair-minded common sense. 

“It’s thus: at times we are God’s instruments,/A means of forwarding divine events,/When He so pleases, that concern His creatures,/By various arts, disguised by various features./We have no power without Him, that’s a fact,/If it should please Him to oppose some act./Sometimes, at our request, He gives us leave/To hurt the body, though we may not grieve/The soul. Take Job; his is a case in point./At other times the two are not disjoint,/That is to say, the body and the soul./Sometimes we are allowed to take control/Over a man and put his soul to test,/But not his body; all is for the best;/For every time a man withstands temptation/It is a partial cause of his salvation…” 

The eloquent demon of the Friar’s tale is an altogether reasonable fellow, and as he notes here, he’s part of the divine plan—not an enemy to it. This is a scholarly answer to questions about the existence of evil. In this Dante-esque view, free will is necessary to a universe founded on love, and thus the foolish summoner of this tale needs to be free to be a jerk, and to choose not to repent—as indeed he does. The mixture of theology and folktale here shows the sweep of medieval Christianity, and also fits into the medieval preaching tradition of the exemplum—the instructive little story.

“For I assure you both, believe me well,/Our orisons are more effectual/And we see more of Christ’s most secret things/Than common people do, or even kings./We live in poverty and abstinence/But common folk in riches and expense/On food and drink, and other foul delight;/But we contemn [sic] all worldly appetite.”

The Summoner uses long passages of dialogue in his retort to the Friar, placing oily hypocrisies in the mouth of his own fictional friar. Neither Summoner nor Friar chooses to make a case for himself; rather, the two men slander each other’s professions. In the end, as is so often the case in the tales by and about religious figures, the reasder is left with the sense that everyone is culpable.

“Hear how my author ends the tale he told: ‘This story does not mean it would be good/For wives to ape Griseld’s humility,/It would be unendurable they should./But everybody in his own degree/Should be as perfect in his constancy/As was Griselda.’ That is why Petrarch chose/To tell her story in his noble prose./For since a woman showed such patience to/A mortal man, how much the more we ought/To take in patience all that God may do!” 

The Clerk ends the rather horrifying story of patient Griselda with this explanatory gloss and goes on to approvingly nod at the resilience of the Wife of Bath in the face of male violence and hypocrisy. After the back-and-forth bickering of small-minded men, the Clerk’s Tale provides a breath of genuine empathy. In reading the story of Griselda as an allegorical tale of human life in a painful world (rather than a sermon preaching impossible virtue to women), the Clerk presents a unifying and sensitive vision standing in sharp contrast to the self-centeredness of many tale-tellers on the road to Canterbury. 

“I hope to God that you will shortly know/There’s no such paramount felicity/In marriage, nor is ever like to be,/As to disqualify you for salvation,/Provided you observe some moderation,/Tempering down the passions of your wife/With some restriction of your amorous life,/Keeping yourself, of course, from other sin./My tale is done, but there! My wit is thin./Be not afraid, dear brother, that’s the moral./Let us wade out, however, of this quarrel;/The Wife of Bath, if you can understand/Her views in the discussion now on hand,/Has put them well and briefly in this case…” 

In this passage from the Merchant’s story, a character breaks the fourth wall into the frame narrative. These lines belong to Justinus, the buddy of the lusty old knight January; here, Justinus wryly reflects that no one’s likely to be barred from heaven because of getting too much pleasure out of married life. But in order to make this point, he quotes the Wife of Bath. This intrusion of the frame narrative into the world of the tale gives the reader the sense that all the characters are truly listening to each other—but also reminds the reader that they, too, are simply characters in a tale.

It’s notable, too, that both the Merchant and the Clerk refer back to the Wife of Bath; her story clearly makes a big impression on the men around her!

“There was a mist that glided from the earth/And gave the sun a huge and ruddy girth,/And yet it was so beautiful a sight/That all their hearts were lifted in delight,/What with the season and the dawn-light springing/And noise of all the birds in heaven singing,/For instantly she knew what they were saying/And understood the meaning in their maying.” 

This passage of the Squire’s story interweaves a naturalistic joy in the spring with a romantic tale of magic. As the story’s heroine, Canace, walks out on a fine spring morning, she wears an enchanted ring allowing her to understand the birds’ language, and so understands their meaning in a literal way. But this is also an image of feeling at one with nature on a gorgeous day—an image that evokes both the pilgrims’ own springtime journey and the lively youthfulness of this tale’s teller.

“Eternal God that by Thy providence/Guidest the world in wise omnipotence,/They say of Thee that Thou has nothing made/In vain but, Lord, these fiendish rocks are laid/In what would rather seem a foul confusion/Of work than the creation and conclusion/Of One so perfect, God the wise and stable;/Why madest Thou thy work unreasonable?” 

In this passage, the faithful and loving Dorigen, worrying for her husband Arveragus as he travels the dangerous seas, asks God an old question about the mystery of the world’s evils. Her humble sadness here provides a counter to the crystalline wifely patience of Griselda in the Clerk’s story. It’s all part of the humane tone of “The Franklin’s Tale,” which concludes the poem’s debates about marriage with a gentle evenhandedness. Perhaps, the Franklin suggests, the question in a marriage isn’t who should rule, but how each spouse can best love and serve the other.

“First let me tell you whence her name has sprung,/Cecilia, meaning, as the books agree/ ‘Lily of Heaven’ in our English tongue,/To signify her chaste virginity;/Or for the whiteness of her constancy,/The greenness of her conscience, of her fame/The scent and sweetness, ‘lily’ was her name./Cecilia may betoken ‘path to the blind’/From the example given in her story;/Or in Cecilia some would have us find/A union as it were of ‘Heaven’s glory’/And Leah, the Active Life, in allegory…”

The Second Nun’s examination of St. Cecilia’s name provides an example of an important strand of medieval thought. Religious stories were to be read on many levels, from the literal to the symbolic to the allegorical. Here, the Nun finds a whole constellation of meaning in a single word, reflecting the complexity and numinosity of language for medieval Christians.

“Armenian clay, borax and verdigris,/Earthen and glass-ware vessels piece by piece,/Our urinals, our pots for oil-extraction,/Crucibles, pots for sublimative action,/Phial alembic, beaker, gourd-retort,/And other useless nonsense of the sort/Not worth a leek, needless to name them all;/Water in rubefaction, bullock’s gall,/Arsenic, brimstone, sal ammoniac,/And herbs that I could mention by the sack,/Moonwort, valerian, agrimony and such,/Which I could number if it mattered much.” 

The Canon’s Yeoman, indignant and world-weary, here lists only some of the necessary tools of the alchemist’s trade. While this story is an indictment of trickery, falsehood, and greed, a touch of Chaucerian exuberance appears in the sheer length and specificity of the Yeoman’s speech. The poet’s interest in the material reality of the world around him peeks through even in this catalogue of chicanery—which, so far as the reader can tell, is a faithful account of a medieval alchemist’s toolkit.

“Wise Plato says, as those who can may read,/Words should be in accordance with the deed. In tales told properly a word should bring/The sense of being cousin to the thing./I’m a blunt, boisterous man and tell you all/There is no real difference at all/Between a lady-wife of high degree/Dishonest of her body, if she be,/And some poor wench, no difference but this/—That’s if so be they both should go amiss—/That since the gentlewoman ranks above/She therefore will be called his ‘lady-love’,/Whereas that other woman, being poor,/Will be referred to as his wench or whore.” 

The Manciple’s little aside about what language can (and cannot) do marks him a pragmatist. While he shakes his head over the behavior of Phoebus’s wife in his story, he’s also alert to the world’s hypocrisy without quite seeming to condemn it. The moral here is less to do with how one should comport oneself as a spouse and more to do with not getting involved in other people’s business.