THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

embodying the spirit of chivalry, so, in their respective callings, the Parson stands for the true mission of the Church
to the poor, and the Ploughman for the blessedness of holy poverty. When Chaucer describes the two as brothers, it is
likely that he sees their fraternity as rooted in Christian meekness and closeness to God. Both, in the manner of
Langland’s Piers, act out the gospel: the Parson by offering a ‘noble ensample to his sheep’ and the Ploughman by
‘lyvynge in pees and parfit charitee’.
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Although it has been suggested that the Knight’s professional career has been marked by a series of military
disasters and that both his portrait and his tale can be read ironically, it would seem likely that the overall scheme of
The Canterbury Tales, had it ever been completed, would have served to enhance his dignity rather than to undermine
it. The Host of the Tabard proposes that each of the pilgrims should tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two
on the return journey. Even in the fragmentary and unfinished form in which the poem has come down to us (only
twenty-four tales are told), it is clear that the Knight’s taking precedence as the first story-teller is not merely a matter
of chance. The narrator comments that although he cannot tell whether it was a matter of ‘aventure, or sort, or cas
[chance]’ that the luck of the draw fell to such a natural leader, the fact that it did so both pleases the other pilgrims
and satisfies the demands of social decorum. The Knight’s Tale, an abbreviated version of Boccaccio’s Teseida, is an
appropriately high-minded history of the rivalry of two noble cousins for the love of a princess, a history elegantly
complemented by accounts of supernatural intervention in human affairs and equally elegant and decisive human
ceremonial. If the Ploughman is not allotted a tale, the Parson’s, with which The Canterbury Tales concludes, is a
long prose treatise on the seven deadly sins, less a tale than a careful sermon expressive of devout gravitas and earnest
learning. Sandwiched between these two tales Chaucer arranges stories loosely fitted to their tellers’ tastes and
professions and tailored to fit into the overarching narrative shape by prologues, interjections, or disputes between
characters. The Parson’s singularly worthy discourse is complemented by that of the otherwise shadowy Nun’s Priest
who offers a lively story of a wily cock caught by a fox, a story which he rounds off with the clerical insistence that
listeners grasp ‘the moralite’. The Pardoner too tells a tidy moral tale, though its carefully shaped warning of the
mortal dangers of covetousness can be seen reflecting back on the personal avarice to which its teller spiritedly and
frankly confesses in his prologue: ‘I preche of no thyng but for coveityse | ... Thus kan I preche agayn that same vice |
Which that I use, and that is avarice. | But though myself be gilty in that synne, | Yet kan I maken oother folk to
twynne [turn] | From avarice, and soore to repente.’ The Prioress also tells a short, devotional tale of a pious Christian
child whose throat is cut by Jews but who miraculously manages to continue singing a Marian hymn after his death.
Its pathos, if not to the taste of more morally squeamish ages, is evidently well received by its devout fourteenthcentury
hearers.
Elsewhere in The Canterbury Tales tellers seem to have far less inclination to wear their hearts and consciences on
their sleeves. The Merchant, prompted by the Clerk’s adaptation of Boccaccio’s story of the trials of patient Griselda,
offers the salutary tale of an old husband (January) and his ‘fresshe’ young bride (May), an impatiently frisky wife
who, exploiting her husband’s sudden blindness, is seduced in a pear tree by her lover. When January’s sight is
mischievously restored by the god Pluto, Proserpine equally mischievously
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inspires May to claim that she was acting in her husband’s best interests: ‘Up peril of my soule, I shal not lyen, | As
me was taught, to heele with youre eyen, | Was no thyng bet, to make yow see, | Than strugle with a man upon a tree. |
God woot, I dide it in ful good entente.’ At the lower end of the social, and perhaps moral, scale Chaucer allots still
earthier stories to the Miller, the Reeve, the Friar, and the Summoner. When the Host proposes that the Knight’s
‘noble storie’ should be succeeded by something equally decorous from the Monk, the Miller drunkenly intrudes
himself and, somewhat improbably, tells the beautifully plotted tale of a dull-witted carpenter, his tricksy wife, and
her two suitors. The Miller’s Tale presents a diametrically opposed view of courtship to that offered by the Knight. It
also serves to provoke the Reeve (who is a carpenter by profession) into recounting an anecdote about a cuckolded
miller. In like manner, the Friar tells a story about an extortionate summoner who is carried off to hell by the Devil,
and the enraged Summoner (‘lyk an aspen leef he quoke for ire’) responds with the history of an ingenious friar
obliged to share out the unexpected legacy of ‘the rumblynge of a fart’ amongst his brethren.
The Chaucer who so modestly placed himself last in the list of the pilgrims also casts himself in the role of an
incompetent story-teller. His irony is nowhere more pointed than in this cleverly extended and self deprecatory ruse
which opens with a direct challenge to his assumed shyness from the Host. ‘What man artow [art thou]?’, ‘Chaucer’
is asked, ‘Thou lookest as thou woldest find an hare, | For evere on the ground I see thee stare’. The response is the
tale of Sir Thopas, a parody of contemporary romance told in awkward, singsong, six-line stanzas. The parody may
always have served to amuse sophisticated readers, but the Host, who rudely interrupts its progress, claims that its