Chapter 1

Introduction

1 Chaucer and his poem

For most readers the Canterbury Tales mean the General Prologue,
with its gallery of portraits, and a few of the more humorous tales.
What we retain is a handful of remarkable personalities, and such
memorable moments as the end of the Miller’s tale. These are worth
having in themselves, but it requires an extra effort to see the signif-
icant relationship among them, and to recognize that their bewil-
dering variety is Chaucer’s technique for representing a single social
reality. We may compare the first part of Shakespeare’s Henry IV,
where our impressions can be so dominated by Falstaff, Hotspur and
Hal as to leave Henry and the problems of his reign in shadow. The
comparison is the more suggestive in that Shakespeare has recreated
the England of Chaucer’s last years, when a society that is essentially
that of the Canterbury Tales was shaken by usurpation, regicide and
civil war. Both poets describe a nation unsure of its identity, distrust-
ful of traditional authority, and torn by ambition and materialism
into separate spheres of interest. For both, the drives and interac-
tions of individual personalities express a loss of central control, a
failure of hierarchy which affects society at all levels.
Shakespeare’s focus is always on a single “body politic,” and
though his characters span all levels of society, their situations are
determined by a central crisis of monarchical authority. Chaucer’s
project is harder to define. He shows us nothing of Shakespeare’s
royal Westminster, and gives us only a glimpse of his chaotic
Eastcheap; and though profoundly political in their implications,
the Tales offer no comment on contemporary politics. But the
Canterbury pilgrims, too, are a society in transition, their horizons

1
2 THE CANTERBURY TALES

enlarged by war and commerce, their relations complicated by new

types of enterprise and new social roles. What holds them together
is a radically innovative literary structure, a fictional world with
no center, defined by oppositions between realistic and idealistic,
worldly and religious, traditionalist and individualist points of view.
The plot of the Tales is simple enough. In early April, the narrator
is lodged at the Tabard in Southwark, ready to make a pilgrimage
to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury, when a group
of twenty-nine pilgrims arrive at the inn. The narrator is admitted
to their number and provides portraits of most of the group, each of
whom embodies a different aspect of English society. The host of the
Tabard, Harry Baily, decides to join the pilgrims, and proposes a game
to divert them on the road: all will tell stories, and the best tale will be
rewarded at journey’s end with a supper at the Tabard. The bulk of
the poem consists of the tales of twenty-three pilgrims, interspersed
with narrative and dialogue which link their performances to the
frame of the pilgrimage journey.
The literary form of the story collection, in which narratives of
diverse kinds are organized within a larger framing narrative, had
a long history, and had been treated with new sophistication in
Chaucer’s own time. But neither the Confessio Amantis of his friend
John Gower, which was in progress during the early stages of his
own project, nor Boccaccio’s Decameron, which he almost certainly
knew, exhibits anything like the complexity of the Tales. The social
diversity of Chaucer’s pilgrims, the range of styles they employ, and
the psychological richness of their interaction, both with one an-
other and with their own tales, are a landmark in world literature.
In no earlier work do characters so diverse in origin and status as
Chaucer’s “churls” and “gentles” meet and engage on equal terms.
In the Decameron “churls” exist only as two-dimensional characters
in stories told by an aristocratic company. In the Romance of the Rose,
the thirteenth-century love-allegory which was the greatest single
influence on Chaucer’s poetry, the low social status and coarse be-
havior of “Evil-Tongue” and “Danger” is allegorical, defining them
as threats to the progress of the poem’s courtly lover. But Chaucer’s
churls exist on the same plane of reality as the Knight and Prioress.
Some are undeniably beyond the pale in ordinary social terms, and
their membership in the pilgrim company gives them a voice they
 Introduction 3
could acquire in no other way. Under the rough authority of the
Host, and the wide-eyed, uncritical gaze of the narrator, characters
as mean or unsavory as the Manciple and Summoner take part in
a dialogue in which no point of view is exempt from criticism and
conventional social values have frequently to be laid aside.
The narrator is one of the most remarkable features of the Tales.
He is at once the most innocent and most knowing of men, seem-
ingly guileless as he points to the revealing traits of speech and be-
havior in his fellow pilgrims, yet astute in filling the gaps created by
their reticence, and placing them in relation to the issues affecting
their world. Naiveté aside, this narrator must resemble the historical
Geoffrey Chaucer, a poet uniquely qualified by background and ex-
perience to produce a work so broad in its social vision. He was the
son of a successful merchant who had served the crown as a cus-
toms official. As an adolescent he entered the service of Elizabeth,
Countess of Ulster and wife of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, second son
of Edward III. Still in his teens, he was captured while serving with
Edward’s invading army in France, and ransomed by the King. From
the mid-1360s until his death around 1400 he served the crown, vis-
iting France and Italy on diplomatic missions, working as a customs
official, sitting on various commissions and for a term as a Member
of Parliament, and acting as Clerk of the Works, in charge of the
maintenance of various royal buildings. He was in close touch with
the worlds of law, commerce, diplomacy, and warfare, and with the
life of the court and aristocracy. He was also one of the most learned
laymen of his day, and one of the most European in outlook, fully
at home with French culture, and ahead of his time in appreciating
the brilliant achievements of fourteenth-century Italy. And though
his poetry rarely says so directly, he was acutely aware of the grim
realities of English politics.
In the last years of Edward III, the heavy taxation required by long
and unsuccessful wars, charges of corruption against high officials,
and hostility to the wealth and power of the Church were dividing the
country. The “Good Parliament” of 1376 indicted several prominent
courtiers and financiers, but its attempted reforms had little effect. In
the late 1370s a series of poll taxes brought to a head the longstand-
ing grievances of the laboring classes, who, since the labor short-
ages caused by the terrible plagues of 1348–49, had seen repeated
4 THE CANTERBURY TALES

attempts to control their wages and mobility. In 1381, under the

pressures of taxation, anxiety about foreign competition in the cloth
trade, and a concern for legal rights, the Peasants’ Revolt broke out
in several parts of southern England. In London many buildings
were burned, including the sumptuous palace of Chaucer’s patron
John of Gaunt, and a mob killed dozens of Flemish merchants and
cloth-workers. Richard II, who had assumed the throne at the age of
ten in 1377, showed courage and judgment in negotiating with the
rebels, but his later years were marred by favoritism and financial
irresponsibility. The Parliament of 1386, in which Chaucer sat as a
member for Kent, demanded many reforms, and when Richard re-
fused to accede, battle was joined between the king’s supporters and
his chief opponents. The rebel lords, who included the future King
Henry IV, having gained a victory at Radcot Bridge in Oxfordshire
and marched on London, became the so-called Lords Appellant of
the “Merciless Parliament” of 1388, in the course of which a number
of Richard’s friends and financial backers were sentenced to death.
Chaucer seems to have maintained good relations with the Court
through three troubled decades, though his friends included men
deeply involved in the conflicts of the time, some of whom lost their
lives. And apart from two disparaging references to the Peasants’
Revolt, his poetry never addresses contemporary political issues. He
was clearly troubled by the effects of commerce and social mobil-
ity: restlessness, ambition, and a concern with power are pervasive
among the Pilgrims, and are always suspect. But in matters of prac-
tical politics, his view of established authority seems to have been
fundamentally conservative.
On religious questions, too, Chaucer is reticent. In a period of
mounting hostility to the established Church, he confines his crit-
icism to the specific excesses of the Friar, Pardoner, and Monk. He
never addresses the condition of the episcopal hierarchy, or urges
any reform more radical than the renewal of fundamental Christian
values outlined in the Parson’s tale. However, it is likely that he was
responsive to evangelical tendencies at work among the lower clergy
and laity. Throughout the later fourteenth century the reformers
known to their opponents as “Lollards” (mumblers [of prayers]?),
inspired by the largely anti-establishment theology of John Wycliffe,
sought to free religious practice from the sanctions of the Church
 Introduction 5
hierarchy, and placed a new emphasis on the individual conscience.
Though attacked as heretics, their concern to distance religion from
worldly institutions had a broad appeal. Chaucer’s clear preference
for the simple, private piety promoted by the Nun’s Priest and the
Parson, as against the elaborately self-dramatizing religiosity of the
Man of Law and the Prioress, would be fully consonant with Lollard
sympathies. We may note that in the “Epilogue” that follows the Man
of Law’s tale in several manuscripts, the Parson is openly accused of
Lollardy, and makes no attempt to deny the charge. The accusation
is based on his aversion to the swearing of religious oaths, a typical
Lollard attitude with which Chaucer shows sympathy elsewhere.
It is possible, too, that the capping of the tale-telling game with the
Parson’s austere penitential treatise indicates sympathy with the re-
formers. Certainly Chaucer’s friends included the so-called “Lollard
Knights,” courtiers and men of affairs who gave protection to Lollard
preachers and maintained certain distinctive practices and beliefs.
The extent of their Lollardy is hard to gauge, but several in their
wills requested simple funerals and graves, and asked that money
from their estates be given to the poor rather than providing rich
funeral feasts or bequests to religious institutions. Such austerity
did not prevent their pursuing successful careers as soldiers, diplo-
mats and land-owners, but the contradiction is no greater than that
presented by Chaucer’s own “Retraction” to the Canterbury Tales, in
which much of that work and the bulk of his earlier poems are re-
pudiated as “worldly vanitees.”
But if Chaucer’s position on major questions remains elusive, the
form of his poem and its treatment of character are themselves ve-
hicles of serious social criticism. A major project of the Tales is the
testing of traditional values. In the General Prologue a hierarchical
model of society, defined by traditional obligation and privilege, pro-
vides a tentative framework, but few of the pilgrims can be said to
embody traditional roles in a recognizable form, and theirs are the
least palpably real of Chaucer’s portraits. More often the rejection or
usurpation of traditional roles provides an index to social mobility:
again and again such “modern” tendencies as the secularizing of the
religious life, or the aspirations of the professions and guilds, take the
form of an emulation or appropriation of the style and prerogatives
of gentility. Such pretensions are often only a veil for self-interest,
6 THE CANTERBURY TALES

but they point up the inadequacy of traditional categories to define

the hierarchical position of newly powerful commercial and profes-
sional groups concerned to claim a status and dignity of their own.
Faced with so many forms of “worthiness,” the narrator must finally
concede his inability to set his characters “in their degree,” the place
where they “stand” in traditional social terms.
Chaucer was well situated to appreciate this crisis of values. Fa-
miliar as he was with many areas of his society, he was primarily
a courtier and a gentleman, for whom courtesy, honor and truth
constituted social norms. He would have agreed with the Wife of
Bath that gentility bears no inherent relation to birth or fortune,
but he clearly saw it as more readily compatible with some ways of
life than with others. Hence his portraits of such emergent “gentles”
as the Merchant and the Man of Law mix respect for their profes-
sional and public functions with a keen awareness of how easily
these can coexist with covert or self-deceiving materialism and self-
aggrandizement. He would probably have conceded them the status
of gentlemen, but there is no clear line between their world and that
of the equally professional Shipman and Physician, though the one
is perhaps a pirate and the other something of a charlatan.
But if the usurpation of gentility and its prerogatives disturbs
Chaucer, the chivalric and courtly ideals are themselves scrutinized
in the course of the poem, and it is made clear that they harbor
their own inherent contradictions. In keeping with Chaucer’s con-
cern for hierarchy, the Knight, highest in rank among the pilgrims,
opens the competition with a tale that promotes the virtues of
Theseus, conqueror and knightly hero par excellence. Unabashedly
an argument for chivalry as the basis of social order, the tale never-
theless shows chivalry repeatedly unable to contain or subdue disor-
der, largely because its only resource is authority imposed from above
and reinforced by armed power. Ultimately, the tale is a searching ex-
ploration of the limits of the chivalric ethic as a political instrument.
Other tales extend this critique to courtly values in general, not only
by parody, as in the Miller’s rejoinder to the Knight, but by focus-
ing on them directly, as when the Wife of Bath uses the standard
of gentilesse to expose an Arthurian knight’s failure to exhibit true
courtly conduct. The Squire’s tale, the imaginative vision of a knight
in embryo, shows naiveté and confusion coexisting with real virtues
 Introduction 7
in a young mind that takes courtly values wholly for granted. And
the Franklin, a man (like Chaucer) at home on the border between
the courtly and practical worlds, subjects the ethical contradictions
of the courtly code to a peculiarly modern scrutiny, showing that
much of what seems foolish in the Squire’s performance is inherent
in the courtly ideal itself.
And of course the world of the Tales includes a number of char-
acters who are not courtly, for whom the narrator feels a need to
apologize and whose coarseness he carefully disowns. The impor-
tance of the opposition of “churls” to “gentles” is established by the
opening cluster of tales, in which the Knight’s cumbersome cele-
bration of order is challenged by the brilliant and broadly salutary
parody of the Miller, and this in turn by the largely ad hominem thrust
of the Reeve. The descent from highly serious poetry to parody to
personal attack implies a breakdown of social order that ends in
the flight of the Cook’s wayward apprentice; as the Cook’s narrative
disintegrates into the random particulars of London lowlife, we are
left at an immense distance from the ceremonial world of Theseus.
The social oppositions defined in this opening sequence do not ap-
pear again in so clear-cut a form, but their implications pervade the
entire poem.
The tension between large, public concerns like those of the
Knight and the narrower vision of the churls is also expressed in
a contrast of literary genres. Like the Knight, the gentle Squire and
Franklin tell tales that can be defined as romance, centered on the
world of chivalry and courtly idealism. The typical mode of the
churls, brilliantly exemplified by the Miller’s and Reeve’s tales, is
the fabliau, a short comic tale, often deliberately coarse, which nor-
mally deals with a bourgeois or lower-class world and emphasizes
action, cleverness, and the gratification of instinct. This opposition
of genres, too, is clearest in the opening sequence; in later tales ro-
mance and fabliau elements are often combined with one another,
or adapted to other concerns. In the Merchant’s history of the mar-
riage of January a grotesque attempt at romance is gradually trans-
formed into the fabliau of the elderly hero’s betrayal. The Wife of
Bath describes her own marital history in terms that are very much
those of the world of fabliau, but then, through her intense imag-
ining of a life in which women would be valued at their true worth
8 THE CANTERBURY TALES

and treated with real gentilesse, she transcends that world. From the
rough-and-tumble of her fifth marriage she emerges into an equi-
librium of mutual respect, and the passage from her prologue to her
tale is simultaneously a passage from fabliau to romance. Romance
becomes self-critical in the hands of the Franklin, and fabliau is a
vehicle for satire in the Summoner’s rejoinder to the Friar. And the
tale of the Shipman, who dwells on the border between the world of
the professionals and that of the churls, is in effect an upper-class
fabliau, pragmatic and mechanical in treating economic and sexual
motivation, but deceptively subtle in presenting the private world of
its merchant protagonist.
There is a broad pattern in the interaction of romance and fabliau
in the Tales, an increasing tendency to expose the contradictions
and absurdities of the one accompanied by a perceptible rise in the
dignity of the other. The shift expresses an increasingly pragmatic
approach to the social reality the poem engages, an uneasiness with
traditional categories and a desire to bring emerging social forces
into confrontation. A broadly similar opposition can be observed
among the tales of religion. The first of these, the Man of Law’s tale,
presents itself as a religious counterpart to the Knight’s, comparable
in solemnity and historical perspective, and similarly committed to
affirming order in the face of the uncertainties of earthly life. The
Man of Law’s Custance is an emperor’s daughter and the “mirror
of all courtesy,” and her story has been aptly described as “hagio-
graphic romance.” The rich rhetoric of prayer and sentiment in the
Prioress’s tale is similarly indebted to courtly poetry. At the opposite
pole are the Nun’s Priest’s Aesopian fable of the cock and the fox and
the spare penitential treatise of the Parson. Together they present a
daunting challenge to religious emotionalism and high style, as the
blunt colloquialism and materialist skepticism of the churls debunk
the ideals of romance.
But the tales of Man of Law and Prioress, whatever their effect
as vehicles of religious sentiment, also express distinctive points of
view toward the world. The Man of Law’s horror of the familial
tensions that continually threaten his Custance, and the broader
anxiety about earthly justice that pervades his tale, at times getting
the better of his faith in Providence, are the preoccupations of a
man who knows these problems at first hand. The Prioress’s tale is
 Introduction 9
marred by a violence and anti-Semitism that are no less horrible
for being virtually invisible to the Prioress herself, and expose the
emotional privation behind her façade of genteel and complacent
piety. The social and spiritual complexities revealed in the process
of tale-telling are the real focus of both performances, and remind
us of the importance of character as a vehicle of social criticism, the
extent to which we must rely on the often distorted vision of the
pilgrims themselves to gauge the bearing of great issues on their
lives.
Chaucer goes to extraordinary lengths to show the obstacles
to vision and knowledge posed by the pilgrims’ existential situa-
tions, and we may compare his perspective to that of the great
Franciscan philosopher of the previous generation, William of
Ockham. “Ockham’s razor” is often said to have severed philoso-
phy from theology: this is an exaggeration, but his denial of the
necessity of natural secondary causes (since there is nothing God
might effect through a secondary cause that He is not equally able to
accomplish directly), and his confinement of scientia, or real knowl-
edge, to the sphere of observation and logical inference, tend in this
direction. They allow us to affirm little about the relation of cre-
ated life to God beyond the acknowledgment, through faith, of his
omnipotence and goodness, and the ethical imperative of obeying
his commands. Chaucer accepts similar constraints for his charac-
ters. Theseus’ evocation of the benevolent “First Mover,” insofar as
it is more than a political gesture, is a leap of faith, and a pervasive
concern of the Tales as a whole is the psychological effect of living
with no more immediate confirmation of order and providence than
such a leap provides. Some characters simply refuse to consider
“Who hath the world in honde”; others reveal their anxiety in
such neurotic forms as the Man of Law’s vacillating attitude to-
ward Providence or the Pardoner’s compulsive blasphemy; and the
Nun’s Priest, apparently after serious thought, seems to have made
peace with the likelihood that the large questions of providence and
self-determination are unanswerable.
Cut off from a sure sense of relation to the divine, or of their place
in a traditional hierarchy, the pilgrims question their own status.
Many of the tales are essays in self-definition, attempts to estab-
lish values and goals that lead to startling revelations. The Knight,
10 THE CANTERBURY TALES

whose tale begins as an apology for chivalry, finds himself unable

to bring it to a satisfying resolution, and is carried steadily toward
a confrontation with the horror of violence and death which chal-
lenges his chivalric values. The Wife of Bath, trying to justify a life
of striving for mastery in marriage, becomes half-aware that her
deepest need is to be recognized and valued as a woman, something
of which her society seems incapable. The Pardoner flaunts his suc-
cess as a religious huckster and defies the taboo effect of his sexual
abnormality, but gradually reveals a religious inner self that accepts
the paradoxical guilt of the scapegoat, an agonizing display that il-
lustrates the intolerance of a Christian society. In all these cases the
tale-tellers’ struggles are rendered more painful by a vision of order
or harmony or forgiveness that seems to hover just out of reach.
The elaborate context in which Chaucer’s characters live and
think is again a landmark in literary history. To compare the Wife of
Bath or the Pardoner with the embodiments of lechery and hypocrisy
in the Romance of the Rose on whom they are modeled is to see at once
the greater depth and complexity of Chaucer’s creations. The noble
company who tell the tales of the Decameron are social equals with
no personal history, charming but limited by their very urbanity.
Their relations with one another and with the tales they tell exhibit
none of the interplay that gives the Canterbury Tales their rich com-
plexity. The closest equivalent to the dense social and psychological
medium in which Chaucer’s characters function is the Inferno of
Dante, and their self-revelations are often as powerful as those of
Dante’s sinners. But Dante’s characters are necessarily static, fixed
forever in the attitudes defined by their besetting sins; Chaucer’s are
alive, able to exercise their imaginations in ways which unexpect-
edly open up new dimensions in their lives. Their condition is one
of radical uncertainty and vast possibility.
The project of tale-telling is of course what keeps the lives of the
pilgrims open-ended, and the juxtaposition and interaction of the
tales are the basis of the poem’s structure. To address the difficult
question of the pattern that emerges as the sequence of tales runs
its course, we may divide the poem into a series of broad move-
ments. The first is bracketed by the tales of the Knight and the Man
of Law, the two major attempts in the poem to address the prob-
lem of order. The Knight’s tale, as I have suggested, is undone by
 Introduction 11
contradictions inherent in the chivalric code. In the Man of Law’s
tale commitment is undermined by personal anxiety. He loudly af-
firms God’s abiding concern for Custance, but feels a need to sup-
plement Providence with an officiousness of his own which ensures
that her contact with the world is minimal. Custance never becomes
real, her human constancy is never tried, and the narrator remains
torn between commitment to faith in God and an irrepressible fear
of imminent danger. Thus this first group of tales calls into question
the authoritarian models proposed by the two highest-ranking pil-
grims. The challenge to order which surfaces in the Knight’s tale and
is elaborated in the descending movement of the tales that follow,
as social vision is increasingly narrowed by personal concerns, is
recapitulated in the Man of Law’s tale as a conflict in the narrator’s
own view of the world.
In the broad central area of the poem, social criticism is on a
smaller scale. The problem of authority in marriage, introduced
in spectacular fashion by the Wife of Bath, is a recurring theme,
punctuated by the naming of the Wife in the tales of both Clerk and
Merchant, and climaxed by the Franklin’s exhaustive catalogue of
the things that make for success in marriage. The astute perceptions
of the Shipman likewise center on domestic relations. Otherwise the
tales of this section are largely fueled by private concerns. The so-
cial conflict dramatized in the first fragment reappears on a reduced
scale in the mutual hostility of Friar and Summoner, which com-
bines criticism of institutions with ad hominem malevolence, and the
closest equivalents to the institutional commitments of the Knight
and Man of Law are the Squire’s breathless and abortive flight of
courtly idealism and the tormented piety of the Prioress’s miracle
story. The tales of Merchant and Physician are circumscribed by
the materialism of their tellers, and the Wife and Pardoner are con-
cerned as much with their status as human beings as with the issues
implied by their social roles.
In the midst of the varied company of this central group, the
Clerk’s tale stands out with stark clarity. The story of patient Griselde
and her tyrannical husband has been explained as answering the
Wife of Bath’s challenge to male authority in marriage by vindi-
cating the traditional, misogynistically conceived institution as a
proving-ground of virtue. But in the end, as the intensity of Griselde’s
12 THE CANTERBURY TALES

suffering forces its way to the surface, what we learn is that the con-
straints imposed on her are indeed “importable” (unbearable). The
Clerk’s story is a searching comment on power and authority, not
only in the social context implied by the role of Walter, an Italian
minor tyrant of a kind Chaucer may have observed at first hand, but
in the institutionalizing of moral values and the creation of moral
fiction. The almost perversely beautiful style which sets off the pro-
longed sufferings of Griselde cannot wholly conceal a substructure
of sado-masochistic fantasy. The appropriation of her femininity to
an ostensibly moral and spiritual purpose is at times perilously close
to the fetishistic treatment of emblematic figures in other tales. This
tendency is present in the Man of Law’s overprotection of Custance,
and is carried to extremes in the cases of the twelve-year-old Virginia
of the Physician’s tale or the Prioress’s child-martyr. The Clerk’s tale
has superficial affinities with these tales of sainthood, but its purpose
is humane rather than hagiographical. The convoluted irony of his
performance is finally unfathomable, but a number of features of
his tale hint at an underlying sympathy with the Wife’s attempt to
redefine sexual relations, and it is perhaps the most fully achieved
of all the tales in its rendering of the complexities it addresses.
The four tales which follow are concerned with the value of fiction
itself, and the project of the Canterbury Tales in particular. The pil-
grim narrator’s paired tales, Sir Thopas and Melibee, present a polar
opposition of form and style. Sir Thopas, a comic romance rendered
almost chaotic by a proliferation of incident and the confusion of its
hero’s motives, reflects the array of problems Chaucer has set himself
in the Tales as a whole by his deliberate indulgence of the eccentric
energies of his pilgrims. In the Melibee, a moral argument is ex-
pounded with virtually no regard for narrative or personality, and
the result is a cumbersome tale whose human significance never
emerges. The opposition between the brilliant parody of the one
tale and the ponderous moral eloquence of the other show Chaucer
aware of the difficulty of synthesizing his brilliant and varied gifts
and adapting them to the presentation of a coherent world view.
The tales of the Monk and the Nun’s Priest form a similar pair-
ing, one that invites us to ponder the relevance of epic and tragedy
to the concrete and often homely world of the Tales. The Monk’s
collection of nineteen stories of the falls of great men represents a
 Introduction 13
form Chaucer’s own collection might have taken, a group of exem-
plary stories organized by a common concern with the workings
of fortune. But like the Melibee, the Monk’s tale attains coherence
only at the price of fragmenting history and falsifying character to
reduce its material to simple moral terms. The contrasting tale of the
Nun’s Priest is the Aesopian fable of the cock and the fox, lavishly
embellished with epic and tragic rhetoric, vivid stories illustrating
the truth and value of dreams, and speculation on the theological
meaning of Chauntecleer’s capture by the fox. The implicit sugges-
tion that such materials, the resources of some of Chaucer’s most
serious poetry, are as applicable to the story of a rooster as to human
affairs poses in a new way the question of how literature engages
reality.
A third pairing, between the tales of the Second Nun and the
Canon’s Yeoman, develops the spiritual implications of Chaucer’s
concern with the problems of tale-telling, and points forward toward
the religious emphasis of the poem’s conclusion. There is a precise
thematic contrast between the Yeoman’s largely confessional tale
of the desperate, failed, and finally specious project of “translation”
undertaken by his alchemists, and the Second Nun’s impersonal and
authoritative depiction of the religious transformations wrought by
St. Cecilia. The alchemists’ murky world of fumes, toil, and blind
obsession is the antithesis of the tranquil assurance and radiant
spirituality with which Cecilia and her companions are vested. The
balancing of these tales defines the absolute limits of human art,
and the necessity of spiritual authority as a supplement to earthly
vision. The two tales that conclude the poem reinforce this point in a
way that directly implicates the project of the Canterbury Tales. Both
are dismissive of fiction, but their messages are sharply opposed.
The Manciple’s anti-moral – that it is better not to speak than to risk
the consequences of doing so – seems to deny and mock the very
idea of serious fiction, and the Parson’s total rejection of “fable”
presents the same lesson in a positive form. For the expected verse
tale he substitutes a treatise in prose, designed to aid penitents in
considering the state of their souls, and including a detailed analysis
of the deadly sins and their remedies. As the last of the tales, the
Parson’s treatise is a part of the larger economy of the poem. But its
effect is to withdraw us to another plane of reality, enabling us to
14 THE CANTERBURY TALES

see the world of the previous tales in perspective, and encouraging

us to turn our minds to higher things.
Before we proceed to look more closely at the poem itself, some-
thing must be said about its probable contemporary audience. No
poem lends itself better to oral presentation, and we can be sure that
it was read aloud, but it shows none of the conventional signs of ad-
dress to a mixed audience of courtly aristocrats that mark Chaucer’s
earlier poetry. The Canterbury Tales are a boldly experimental work,
and it is probable that the audience to whom Chaucer looked for a
fully appreciative reception were those most involved in the changes
affecting the world the poem describes. In a verse envoy (letter) to his
friend Bukton, Chaucer urges him to “rede” the Wife of Bath before
entering into marriage; the word can bear several meanings, but
it is probable that what is being suggested is a private rereading of
the Wife’s Prologue, and probable too that the poem as a whole was
aimed most directly at readers capable of thoughtful engagement
with the issues raised by Chaucer’s poetry. Though a new insight
into the condition of women is one of the chief rewards the poem
offers, its audience was no doubt largely male. Whether knights,
civil servants or men of learning, law, or commerce, they are likely
to have been gentlemen who, like Chaucer himself, had learned to
function in several worlds, and had few illusions about the workings
of justice, commerce, or aristocratic and ecclesiastical power. Such
men would recognize clearly the difference between “churl” and
“gentle,” and the Peasants’ Revolt may have sharpened their sense
of it; but in an age of social mobility they would also recognize that
such distinctions were not absolute, and in some cases might even
have been drawn by Lollard sympathies into a closer sense of rela-
tion to those of lower station. We may assume that the Canterbury
Tales did for them what they can still do for us, making them more
aware and more tolerant of human diversity, and so, in a sense of
the word important to Chaucer, more gentle.

2 Chaucer’s language
Chaucer spoke and wrote the English of the South East Midland
region, the language of Gower and Wycliffe, the spoken language
of London, and the branch of Middle English from which our own
 Introduction 15
English most directly descends. By Chaucer’s day English was rapidly
recovering from its displacement by French as the language of the
upper and administrative classes. Legal and other public documents
began to be produced in English, translation from French and Latin
was steadily increasing, and there is evidence of English replacing
French in grammar schools.
The language was not the essentially synthetic language that Old
English had been. During the long dominance of French, and partly
under its influence, the inflections that had indicated the number
and case of nouns had largely disappeared in favor of a greater re-
liance on prepositions, and those indicating the tense and person of
verbs were being replaced by auxiliary verbs. The native processes
of coinage, the combining of existing words or the addition of pre-
fixes and suffixes to form new compounds, had largely fallen into
disuse because of the ready availability of equivalent French terms.
The result of these developments is a language much closer to our
own than Old English, but we must still allow for many peculiari-
ties: elliptical or paratactic syntax; double and triple negatives; the
omission of articles; the habit of forming the negative of such verbs
as witen (know), wile (will or wish) and ben (be) by replacing the
initial consonant, if any, with n.
But for most students the chief obstacle to reading Chaucer in his
own language is the unfamiliar look of Middle English spelling, in
which y often replaces i, and a word can appear in several different
forms in a single text. This is in part the inconsistency of an or-
thography which was not to be standardized for another 300 years,
but it also reflects the fluid state of pronunciation and accent. At
a time when English was drawing freely on French for its vocabu-
lary, the patterns of stress proper to the two languages seem to have
been to some extent interchangeable, and Chaucer exploits this cir-
cumstance to achieve some of his most striking metrical effects. In
polysyllabic words of French or Latin origin such as “daungerous,”
“adversitee,” or “memorie,” the main stress may fall on the final syl-
lable, as we hear it in French, or occur earlier, as in modern English.
At times the same freedom is exercised with non-French words.
“Sórrow” appears also as “sorówe,” and as the vestigially Anglo-
Saxon monosyllable “sorwe.” Terminal e, originally a grammatical
inflection, had become largely a convenience in pronunciation, and
16 THE CANTERBURY TALES

Chaucer frequently relies on it to sustain the iambic movement of a

line, though it also occurs at points where the meter requires that
it be suppressed.
Hearing Chaucer’s English can do a great deal for comprehen-
sion, and there are a few basic rules. Middle English vowels sound
approximately as in a modern European language: short a has the
sound of modern German “Mann” rather than modern English
“hat”; short o is closer to “long” than to American “got”; short u is as
in “put” rather than “putt.” Of the diphthongs, au has the sound of
ou in modern “loud,” and ou that of oo in modern “food.” All conso-
nants are pronounced, so that in a word like “knight,” monosyllabic
for metrical purposes, the “k” and “gh” (= ch in modern German
ich) are clearly audible.
In general, for speakers of modern English, and especially for
those used to American English, Middle English at first requires a
certain physical effort to pronounce, but soon becomes a physical
pleasure. It is helpful to begin by exaggerating each sound, and
noting the role of teeth, tongue, palate, and lips in producing it. A
mirror and a tape recorder can be very useful, and I have listed some
recordings of portions of the Canterbury Tales in the bibliography.

3 The text of the Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales are incomplete. What survives is a series of
fragments, usually consisting of two or more tales whose sequence
is clear. In general there is good manuscript evidence for the or-
dering of these fragments, and scholars now accept almost unani-
mously the order of the handsome early fifteenth-century Ellesmere
Manuscript. Like nearly all manuscripts, Ellesmere reflects some
scribal editing. It frequently regularizes meter and even syntax,
sometimes obscuring Chaucer’s meaning in the process. In this re-
spect it is inferior to the Hengwrt manuscript, evidently produced
by the same scribe and much less heavily edited. But the links
and juxtapositions of tales in Ellesmere are far more plausible than
in Hengwrt (which, among other peculiarities, omits the Canon’s
Yeoman’s tale altogether). It seems likely that Ellesmere reflects a
later and more leisurely editorial process, and it provides the basis
for most standard editions.
 Introduction 17
The ten fragments of the text in Ellesmere are arranged as follows:
I. General Prologue, Knight, Miller, Reeve, Cook
II. Man of Law
III. Wife of Bath, Friar, Summoner
IV. Clerk, Merchant
V. Squire, Franklin
VI. Physician, Pardoner
VII. Shipman, Prioress, Sir Thopas, Melibee, Monk, Nun’s Priest
VIII. Second Nun, Canon’s Yeoman
IX. Manciple
X. Parson, Chaucer’s Retraction

In what follows I have taken the Ellesmere ordering for granted,

though I have indicated places where my reasons for doing so were
chiefly thematic. All quotations are from the Riverside Chaucer,
ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987). Roman numerals indicate
Ellesmere fragments.
 Chapter 4
Churls: commerce and the material world

When the drunken Miller intrudes on the Host’s attempt to order the
sequence of tale-telling with his “legend” of a carpenter and his wife,
his purpose is to “quite” or “repay” the Knight’s tale. He responds as
a “churl” to a tale of upper-class manners and values, and the bawdy
energy of his performance is in itself an apt comment on the Knight’s
abstract and ritualized universe. It is an essentially conservative
response: the Miller offers no alternative to a social structure in
which churls and gentles have their proper stations. But his tale
sets a complex process in motion. As we move forward through the
increasingly violent give-and-take of the Reeve’s fabliau to the Cook’s
world of anarchic self-indulgence, hierarchy is abandoned, and as
the poem proceeds it becomes hard to discern any such clear-cut
opposition of values as that between Knight and Miller.
The tellers of the tales to be discussed in this chapter, though
they include the gentle Merchant and worthy Friar, can all be called
“churls.” Their viewpoint is materialistic and amoral but, with no
regard for orthodox social and religious values, they exhibit a strong,
unwieldy aptitude for social criticism. Nearly all their tales are comic,
but their lives and the lives of their characters are often so distorted by
ambition, the commercializing of social relations, or the bitterness
of empty old age as to make it impossible for them to pursue even
the elemental goods of food, drink, and sex in a straightforward way.
They force us to envision a society cut off from its sustaining bonds
by rampant individualism to the point of losing the capacity for
love.
The Miller is the most genial of the churls, and the vehicle of his
criticism is parody, aimed at the Knight’s treatment of his love story.
He balances the chivalry of Arcite with the aggressive ingenuity of
the student Nicholas, and like the Knight, responding to Theseus’

51
52 THE CANTERBURY TALES

tournament, he pays his poor clerk the hero’s tribute of alliteration,

describing how love of his “lemman” (sweetheart) makes him “hold
her hard by the haunchbones.” The skittish dandyism of Absolon,
which gives way so abruptly and unexpectedly to violent action,
recalls the uneasy relation of religiosity and reckless anger in Pala-
mon. And the stereotypical Emily is eclipsed by the vivid description
of Alisoun, a superb parody of courtly rhetoric in which the details
of form and attire, far from reducing her charms to emblems of mod-
esty and virtue, focus our interest on her lively physical presence.
For the Knight’s aristocratic idealism the Miller substitutes a more
prosaic sense of the prerogatives of nobility: Alisoun is one “For any
lord to leggen (lay) in his bedde, / Or yet for any good yeman to
wedde.” Nicholas’ wooing of her deflates the conventions of courtly
love:

This Nicholas gan1 mercy for to crye, 1 began

And spak1 so faire, and profred him so faste, 1 spoke
That she hir love hym graunted atte laste,
And swoor hir ooth, by seint Thomas of Kent,
That she wol been at his commandement,
Whan that she may hir leyser1 wel espie 1 opportunity
(I.3288–93)

The lover’s appeal and the lady’s acquiescence are interspersed with
the homely oath by a popular saint and pragmatic questions of time
and place, and the process of love-service is enacted in a matter of
minutes.
For the Knight’s broad historical vision the Miller substitutes a
world where time is measured only by the infinitely renewable cycles
of day and week, and Providence is reduced to the granting of sex-
ual pleasure. His “first mover” is Nicholas, whose male designs take
shape, not in a “fair chain of love,” but in a chain of circumstance,
a material economy so self-consistent and complex as to seem vir-
tually organic. As Theseus creates his great theater, the monument
to a chivalry which emulates the beneficent hierarchical order of
the universe, so Old John, the credulous husband, is prompted by
Nicholas to capitalize on “Goddes pryvetee,” and build the elaborate
machinery which effects the climax of the tale.
 Churls 53
Chivalry ennobles what are too often only the confused workings
of male desire. The conventional Christianity which is the ruling
ideology of the Miller’s Oxenford, its counterpart to Theseus’ chival-
ric world view, exists only to be exploited in the service of that same
desire. Nicholas’ clerical skills, his eloquence and Biblical lore impose
his authority on old John, whose simple faith is readily persuaded
that he and Alisoun are exempted from the effect of the prophesied
flood. Elsewhere religion becomes the emblem of desire. Nicholas’
song of the angel’s salute to Mary announces his abrupt physical
address to Alisoun, and their lovemaking is carried on until the hour
of Lauds, when its joys are summed up by a Friars’ chorus chanting
the divine goodness. Even Absolon’s unfortunate kiss is preceded
by a love-song, charged with echoes of the Song of Songs and thus
evoking the kiss with which the Song begins, traditionally a symbol
of the love that links God to each human soul.
But the tale is also about the abuse of innocence. In fleshing out
his fabliau material, Chaucer endows John, the traditional cuckold
husband, with attributes that complicate our response to his plight.
He is devout and industrious as well as foolish, and though his
religion is mostly credulity, he is also humane. His concern over
Nicholas’ seeming illness is genuine, and he responds to the thought
of Alisoun’s drowning with a horror in which uxoriousness mingles
with selfless devotion. But his finest qualities are precisely those
which reduce him to Nicholas’ puppet. The community at large
abounds in a similarly innocent and vulnerable good will. We see it in
the chatty solicitude with which the monk of Oseneye draws Absolon
aside to discuss the possible whereabouts of old John, and in the
banter of Gervays the smith as he unwittingly provides Absolon with
the means to his revenge. Nicholas himself is sufficiently detached
from the prevailing atmosphere to be able to imitate it, as in his
charming but cynical conjuring-up of the aftermath of the flood:

Thanne wol I clepe,1 ‘How, Alison! how, John! 1 call

Be myrie,1 for the flood wol passe anon.’2 1 merry 2 soon
And thou wolt seyn,1 ‘Hayl, maister Nicholay! 1 say

Good morwe,1 I se thee wel, for it is day!’ 1 morrow

(I.3577–80)
54 THE CANTERBURY TALES

“Maister” is an important word here, a mark of the clerical au-

thority on which Nicholas’ power depends. Though the trappings
and avocations of his Oxford life are precisely contrasted with those
of the austere pilgrim Clerk, he is viewed as a clerk within the world
of the tale, and his control of that world is a comment on the power of
the educated cleric for good or ill. It is the worldliness of both clerks
in the story, and their conflict over a worldly matter, that leads to
the tale’s violent conclusion. Like the Knight’s unwieldy chivalry,
the tainted clerical values of the Miller’s tale generate division and
violence under the guise of an enlightened order. And here, too,
the proliferation of division ends by involving all the principals in
accident and unforeseen reciprocity, revealing their ultimate lack
of freedom. Both clerks are punished in a manner befitting their
pretensions, and even Alisoun, though she escapes scot-free from
the chain of just reprisals that resolves the plot, is equally a victim
of her circumstances. Released from her elderly husband’s “cage,”
she is only subjected to new constraint. When she struggles like a
colt in Nicholas’ arms, the image of youthful energy foretells her
submission to the hand that holds her in check.
There is, moreover, a strong hint of sexual violence in Absolon’s
“quiting” of his unfortunate kiss. Bitter in his disillusionment with
love, he plies his sizzling coulter indiscriminately, and has no way of
knowing that it is Nicholas rather than Alisoun that he wounds. The
smithy where the genial Gervays plies his trade is an outpost of the
temple of Mars. But if the story ends by exposing its self-renewing,
comic-strip world as an illusion, it is only Old John whose misfortune
is emphasized. His broken arm is a discord amid the general hilarity,
and it is clerks who set the tone of the merriment at his discomfiture,
collaborating in Nicholas’ protestation that John is simply mad, and
making us suddenly aware of social division. But the miller remains
detached, and offers no final reflection on the potentially anarchic
implications of his comic creation.
In the Reeve’s Cambridge the innocent community of the Miller’s
Oxford is replaced by an economy that binds people together in spite
of themselves, generating ambitions and antagonisms that fore-
close any hope of happiness. No chivalric idealism or clerical in-
genuity shapes the world of this tale. The first mover is the local par-
son, whose use of parish funds to dower his illegitimate daughter
68 THE CANTERBURY TALES

gladness at the conclusion of the poem may express a recognition

that with the promise of this heritage and the help of Damyan he
can retain and in his own way enjoy May. Her “freshness” may yet
come to fruition in the production of a child who, endowed with
his name and substance, may be a monument to himself. Such
a bargain would carry vicarious sexual experience one last stage
further, reducing January to the sponsor of a procreative act, and
so ratifying his own total alienation from natural sexuality. January
is incorrigibly the pornographic hero, all too grotesquely real, yet
totally isolated in an artificial environment of fantasy brought to
material realization by wealth. For Chaucer his dilemma represents
the final barrenness of a life founded on acquisition.
The Pardoner is in many ways the most representative of the
churls, a man openly and avowedly committed to acquisition, yet
one whose rapacity and cynicism mask a deep longing for love and
fellowship, and a bitter hatred of his condition. A professed mate-
rialist, savage in his scorn for those who are moved by his brilliant
preaching to place their trust in his powers of absolution, he is also
in certain respects the most spiritually alive of the pilgrims, and his
worldly and religious selves are in conflict. He insists, repeatedly and
defiantly, on his indifference to the spiritual implications of what he
does, but he is obsessed with the paradox of being uniquely immune
to the effects of his own eloquence, and fearful that his abuse of his
office, his incorrigible depravity and, most of all, his physical sterility,
are a kind of curse, the signs of an incurable spiritual sickness.
But the Pardoner is also justly proud of the preaching that earns
him his living, and even takes a certain pride in his official authority
as an agent of the Church – an authority not necessarily invalidated
by his flagrant abuse of his office, and which Chaucer never denies.
Emboldened by these, he uses his alien status among the pilgrims to
his advantage, exploiting their uneasiness to control their attention,
and even challenging their expectations by laying claim to a normal
sexual life in the face of plain evidence of his debility. The magnetic
effect of his confession is a way of compensating for his exclusion
from ordinary social intercourse.
The bitter side of the Pardoner’s social experience is also evident
in his performance. He is plainly on guard against personal attack.
His credentials serve, he says, “my body to warente” (protect), lest
 Churls 69
any man “disturb” his performance. He fears to confront those who
have done harm to him and his fellow pardoners, but he can “sting”
them with the venom of defamation under the veil of denouncing sin.
Abuse has evidently been a constant danger, and one of many ironies
of his performance is that it ends by provoking a uniquely mortifying
threat from Harry Baily. Yet the Pardoner courts hostility. He is
obsessed with his sexual abnormality, and unable to view it as a mere
accident. Whether he is to be seen as homosexual is not clear, but he
resembles homosexuals and victims of racism in more recent times
in feeling an obscure responsibility for the condition that sets him
apart. Even as he appeals for admiration, his outrageous manner
and appearance flaunt the fact of his strangeness, collaborating with
the suspicions of others, daring yet simultaneously inviting exposure
and punishment. His confession begins as a display of the tricks of the
trade, but becomes dominated by an insistence on the selfishness,
and above all the impiety of his motives. He makes plain not only that
he is greedy, but that his greed is vicious, sinful, a willful violation of
holy things. His dramatic skill maintains his hold over his audience,
but it is a dangerous game: self-assertion is continually turning into
self-exposure, and nothing is fully under his control.
The Pardoner’s intense self-absorption is plain in the attack on
the so-called “tavern” vices that erupts from him as he begins his
tale. A panoramic view of gluttony is followed by briefer condemna-
tions of gambling and the swearing of oaths by the body of Christ.
His powerful sensory imagination makes a tour de force of the excess
which reduces the body to a privy, where the very processes of diges-
tion become a kind of self-damnation, and he dwells with equal force
on drinking, recalling Lot, Herod, and others whose drunkenness
led to incest, murder and self-betrayal. Loss of self-possession is the
dominant note also in the passage on gambling, and the horror of
swearing seems to consist in the contrast between the “idle” nature
of the act and the blasphemy it represents. Throughout there is a
strong sense of the menace that lurks in relatively innocent pursuits,
but in all three cases the threat is disproportionate to the nature of
the sin. To indulge the body’s need for food is not in itself sinful;
gambling does not inevitably lead to “blasphemy, manslaughter,
and waste”; and it is hard to see the citing of Christ’s blood and
bones by Harry Baily or the Miller as a crime worse than homicide.
70 THE CANTERBURY TALES

The true significance of the sermon is not in the nature of the

sins condemned but in their importance to the Pardoner himself.
It is easy to see in his debasing treatment of gluttony a hostility to
the body itself that reflects his own physical problem, and easy, too,
to imagine the emotional need that drives him to pursue the very
sins he attacks: the lines on cheap wine and drunken sleep have
a flophouse authenticity that suggests the sordidness of his way of
life. At a deeper level, the harping on excess is that of a man who
feels himself betrayed, dragged down to the depths, damned by his
own stunted and incorrigible sensuality. He is a sensualist driven
to pursue his lusts largely by a distorted awareness of the spiritual
implications of what he does, an abuser of sacred duties desperate
for some divine indication of disapproval when he willfully exploits
his office. The same intense subjectivity is evident in the narrowly
focused attack on blasphemy, which centers on the dismembering
of Christ in the form of oaths by his blood and body, and gives shape
to the deepest and most all-embracing of the Pardoner’s obsessions.
Just such dismemberments occur at several points in his discourse,
and we can hardly gauge the implications for him of this image
of absolute blasphemy: identification with Christ’s tortured body;
recognition that he stands condemned in the light of the sacrament
it represents; a consequent fear and hatred of what is nonetheless
supremely meaningful to him.
The tale the Pardoner finally tells masterfully develops the con-
fusion in which his three rioters live and move, and we sense that
a curse hangs over them as they move haplessly from drunkenness
to greed and violent death. But the meaning of the tale is strictly
circumscribed, and the rioters themselves remain faceless, crea-
tures of the story’s trap-like plot with no trace of the Pardoner’s
despairing self-consciousness. What renders the tale unforgettable
is the apparition of an old man whose role is Chaucer’s contribu-
tion to the story. In the plot he is a mere signpost, pointing the
“crooked way” to the place where Death is to be found, but Chaucer
makes him respond to the rioters’ questions by describing his life,
an endless search for one who will exchange youth for his extreme
age. Despairing, and condemned to wander without rest, he longs
to die:
 Churls 71
1 1
And on the ground, which is my moodres gate, mother’s
I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late,
And seye ‘Leeve1 mooder, leet me in! 1 dear
Lo! how I vanysshe, flessh, and blood, and skyn!
Allas! whan shul1 my bones been at reste?’ 1 shall
(VI.729–33)

There is nothing religious in this yearning, only a desire to be re-

claimed by the earth. In the futility of this quest we recognize the
Pardoner’s own despairing impotence, and the deeper longing that
underlies the courting of punishment implicit in his confession, a
desire for the oblivion portended by the living death of bodily excess.
Recalling his reflections on the “sepulture” of consciousness and
responsibility in drunkenness, and the vision of cooks transforming
substance to accident, we may now hear in them something of the
longing of Marlowe’s Faustus at the eleventh hour for disintegration,
an escape from the torment of self-awareness into mere materiality.
But as the old man cannot die, so the Pardoner remains a soul in
anguish, unable to accept or deny the judgment seemingly implied
by his abnormal condition. Both figures are strangely empowered
to point the way to what they desire, but impotent to pursue it for
themselves.
The Pardoner’s personal feelings re-emerge in the complex after-
math to his tale. Having brought the story to its dark conclusion, he
inveighs in frenzy against the sins implicated by it, then concludes
the mock-sermon by affirming his powers of absolution and appeal-
ing to his imagined congregation for offerings. He then breaks off
abruptly, and adopts a very different tone to commend the pilgrims
to the true source of redemption:
And Jhesu Crist, that is oure soules leche,1 1 physician
So graunte yow his pardoun to receyve,
For that is best; I wol yow nat deceyve.
(VI.915–18)

This is surely a significant moment for the Pardoner. Granted the

opportunity, doubtless rare in his experience, to speak as a member
of a community, licensed and protected by rules that apply equally
to all, he responds to his enfranchisement with sincerity. But the
72 THE CANTERBURY TALES

sense of community proves impossible to sustain. He withdraws

again behind the mask of the performer and, all too characteristi-
cally tempting fate, proffers his relics to Harry Baily, bringing upon
himself the vicious response he dreads in the form of a threat of cas-
tration. Whatever the threat may imply about his physical state or
Harry’s appreciation of it, it calls attention to his difference from the
other pilgrims in the plainest possible way. The most painful thing
about this exposure is its inevitability, a result in which the will of
the Pardoner and the deeply rooted masculine prejudices of the Host
have collaborated. This conclusion to the Pardoner’s performance,
reducing him to traumatic silence and so rendering him impotent
in a new way, leaves us with the question of just what resolution the
story of such a man could have. The Pardoner seems cut off from any
social function save the power his negative example and self-denying
eloquence may exert in the lives of others. Like most of Chaucer’s
churls, the Pardoner leaves us with a sense of the emptiness of his
experience of life, but none of the others, perhaps no other charac-
ter in literature, conveys such a sense of fallenness, and Chaucer
suggests no comfort for his despair.