The three Tales introduced in this lecture are among Chaucer’s best, and their excellence is the main reason for studying them. However, in considering them as a group, we can also trace a progression in moral intensity: a pair of light-hearted nominal morals is appended to The Nun’s Priest’s Tale; The Merchant’s Tale is a savage exposure of folly, self-deception and moral blindness in old age; while The Pardoner’s Tale is a chilling and deeply ironic warning against cupiditas, i.e. greed.

The text referred to throughout is Nevill Coghill’s translation of The Canterbury Tales into modern English (London: Penguin, 2003). 

I. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale

The Nun’s Priest’s Introduction

The “Words of the Knight and the Host” introduce The Nun’s Priest’s Tale and the Nun’s Priest himself, who is not described in the General Prologue. The Monk has narrated a series of tragedies governed by Fortune, miserable stories belonging to the literary tradition of “The Fall of Princes.” The Knight’s Tale likewise explored the gods’ malevolence, and the power over humans of Fortune’s “treacherous wheel.” However, the Knight interrupts the Monk, saying that people want relief from grief, and that it’s a joy to hear about men who rise or remain prosperous. The Host, Harry Bailly, rudely agrees, and calls on one of the three priests who serve the Prioress to tell a “merry” tale. This, the Host says, will divert the Priest’s mind from the ugly, skinny nag he is riding, and keep up his spirits. “This sweete preest, this goodly man sir John” accordingly tells his story of Chanticleer, a princely rooster who, unlike Arcite and the famous men in The Monk’s Tale, triumphs over misfortune.

Sources of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale

The narrative tradition of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale stretches back to Aesop’s animal fables of the sixth century BC. Aesop tells of a hungry fox who flatters a crow perched in a tree, into singing so that the crow drops a cheese or piece of meat. Medieval story-tellers adapted this exemplum (moral parable or allegory), so that the fox or wolf captures and eats the bird rather than the food. The fable is a warning against the pride that succumbs to flattery. Story-tellers later in the Middle Ages combined the bird’s capture with a tale of his subsequent escape through reciprocal flattery of the fox. By the time Chaucer came to write The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the extended story had reached a sophisticated level in the Reynard the Fox cycle of tales, notably in a version written about 1175 by the poet Pierre de Saint Cloud. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, however, is more skillful than any other surviving version. Chaucer alludes to many literary and cultural traditions, to Biblical and classical stories, and to current events and intellectual debates, all of which would have been readily understood by his first listeners at the court of Richard II. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is in fact a multi-layered masterpiece, the subtlety, humanity and benevolent humour of which mitigates stereotyping of the Middle Ages as crude, ugly and naïve.

We’ll begin by considering the structure of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale and the comic unfolding of the plot. After that, we’ll explore some of the allusions that enliven almost every line of the Tale.

Structure of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale

A leisurely descriptive opening, and an accumulation of rhetorical passages by the narrator and of dialogue among the characters build to a release of energy in an explosive climax—the chase after the Fox. The Fox’s triumph then reverses in a fast anti-climax that spins Fortune’s wheel in the opposite direction.

The opening describes the setting—the widow who lives a frugal, toilsome but contented life farming. The colours associated with the widow and her two daughters are black and white, summed up in the “Milk and brown bread” that grace their table. By contrast, Chanticleer, who “in some measure” (Coghill’s modern English version of The Canterbury Tales, p. 215) rules his seven sister-wives, is gorgeously luminescent and coloured like a rooster in heraldry. Other features further link this cock with the nobility. For example, he adores Pertelote, his favourite hen, in the manner, not only of a hen-pecked husband but also of a courtly lover. Similar comedy applies to Pertelote, in that her barnyard status as a hen mixes with the pretentiousness appropriate to a courtly lady: “She with the loveliest dyes upon her throat/ Was known as gracious Lady Pertelote. (215; my emphasis)

Chanticleer wakes from sleep and tells Pertelote of a nightmare in which an orange-coloured animal like a hound tried to seize and kill him. Pertelote disparages Chanticleer’s fear, asking “Have you no manly heart to match your beard?” (217). After diagnosing the causes as too much red choler and indigestion, she prescribes a digestive and her home-remedy laxative as a remedy. “Take no account of dreams” (217), she says.

In order to re-establish his “maistrie” or sovereignty, a key issue in the Canterbury Tales participating in the “marriage debate,” Chanticleer launches into a lengthy oration designed to prove that dreams do predict the future, and warn of disasters. The learned rooster supports his case by exempla (stories) and by quoting from written authorities.

The first exemplum, of two pilgrims staying overnight in a town where one of them is murdered, introduces a murder motif which will reappear later in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale in relation to the Fox. Chanticleer secondly affirms the truth of dreams by an exemplum in which a man dies at sea after ignoring his friend’s warning. Thirdly, he tells how the saintly Kenelm, aged seven, dreamed of his own death. Chanticleer further supports his point by referring to the Old Testament dreams interpreted by Daniel and Joseph, and to the classical stories of Croesus, and of Hector and Andromache. Unfortunately, the scholarly fowl’s peroration, or formal close to his speech (223), is an irrational about-face, in which he says that his love for Pertelote makes him so brave, and fills him with such joy, that he defies “all visions and all dreams.” The peroration repeats the comical juxtaposition of courtly love idealism with the barnyard setting: “For when I see the beauty of your face,/ That scarlet loveliness about your eyes,/ All thought of terror and confusion dies.” An anti-feminist joke is also present, in that the Latin tag, Mulier est hominis confusio, which Chanticleer translates as “Woman is man’s delight and all his bliss” in fact means “Woman is man’s confusion.” With that Chanticleer flies down from his perch—a turning point in the plot and a mistake that may prove fatal.

There follow some rhetorical flourishes from the Nun’s Priest. The contradiction that Chaucer creates between subject matter and style—chickens and an exalted rhetoric—produces what literary scholars call the “mock heroic.” The Nun’s Priest’s rhetoric includes elaborate evocations of the time and season; high-flown descriptions of Chanticleer and his hens; and loud exclamations against Fate’s and Venus’s untrustworthiness: woe, laments the Priest, is the inevitable end of joy. He goes on to describe Sir Russel the Fox, lurking nearby in a bed of cabbages. The mock heroic exclamations continue, equating the Fox with famous traitors, Judas, Ganelon the betrayer of Roland and Oliver, and Sinon, the traitor of Troy. The Priest then diverts into a discussion of predestination (p. 225), but reminds himself, “my tale is of a cock.”

The fox’s flattery of Chanticleer follows; suspense mounts; the fox seizes Chanticleer; the narrator cries out against Destiny, and prays to the rhetorician, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, for skill to describe this tragic Friday; Chanticleer’s wives lament more loudly than the bereft ladies of Troy, than Hasdrubal’s wife at the sack of Carthage, and the matrons of Nero’s burning Rome. The humans and farm animals in earshot join in the pursuit, in a climax in which the sound and rhythm of the words echo the noisy pursuit. Rhetoric, digressions, diversions and suspense all dissolve in an instantaneous onomatopoeic release (The Canterbury Tales, Group A, lines 4172-4198; Coghill’s translation, pp. 229-30).

An anticlimax follows swiftly, when Fortune’s wheel suddenly goes into reverse: “See how Dame Fortune quickly changes side” (230). Chanticleer reciprocally tricks the Fox into opening his mouth to taunt the pursuers; not one to give up, the Fox then tries again but fails to talk Chanticleer down from his refuge in a tree. Each points a moral: Chanticleer says that people should keep their eyes open; the Fox says that people should keep their mouths shut.

Layers of Meaning in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale

A. The Fall of Eve and Adam

The first layer re-enacts the story of Eve and Adam’s Fall in the Book of Genesis. Under this parallel, Chanticleer is Adam, Pertelote is Eve, and the Fox is the devil. Chanticleer falls into the Fox’s jaws through pride, the first and chief sin of the deadly seven. Under this reading, the Fox’s open mouth or maw is parallel to Hellmouth, a favourite of the medieval imagination, both in the visual arts and in the settings of the contemporary Biblical drama.

Like Adam, Chanticleer falls also from uxoriousness (excessive love of one’s wife). His predicament is ridiculously compounded by his possession of seven wives, a number which may recall the Deadly Sins. Chanticleer’s mistake of flying down from the beam defies what medieval theology said was man’s highest faculty, reason—Chanticleer proves by prolonged logical argument that his warning dream was true, but Pertelote’s beauty makes him set reason aside. The episode comically exposes impulsive human decision-making—“I’ll just do this because I feel like it—it suits my mood.” The Nun’s Priest equates Eve, the bringer of evil to mankind through bad counsel, to Pertelote; and both Eve and Pertelote remind the reader or listener of the Nun’s Priest’s job as a woman’s servant: read his multi-layered passage about women’s counsel (226). The Nun’s Priest ends this tirade with: I can noon harm of no woman divyne, meaning either, “I can’t guess at any harm coming from a woman”, or “I know of no harm from any divine woman”—possibly a reference to the Prioress as his ecclesiastical superior.

B.  Sexuality

A second layer of meaning in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale concerns sexuality. Strict medieval doctrine tolerated sex only within marriage, and then only for the sake of procreation, not for pleasure or as an expression of love between spouses. Chanticleer, however, is a perfect expression of natural, energetic sexuality. He is a servant of Venus, “more for delyt, than world to multiplye” (p. 228). In The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, delivered by a “manly” man, natural sexuality sits beside the Church’s restrictions, in an unresolved and tense opposition.

C.   Topical Commentary

A third layer of meaning in the Tale is social and political commentary. Before the fox erupts on the scene, the widow’s farm is a picture of contentment and virtue among the peasantry. However, many in Chaucer’s audience at Richard II’s court would have experienced the 1381 raid on London by farm labourers (the Peasant’s Revolt). The clamorous, violent pursuit of the Fox therefore suggests the ferment that underlay the surface calm and acceptance of subjugation by rural workers before 1381, a ferment which the upper classes feared could break out again at any moment. Chaucer brings this to mind by comparing the noisy pursuit of the Fox to the killing in London of a group of prosperous Flemish settlers  by Jack Straw, one of the Revolt leaders.

II. The Merchant’s Tale

The Merchant

Chaucer’s description in the General Prologue (Coghill p. 10) reveals the contradiction between the Merchant’s fashionable clothes, his pomposity and boasting of his business successes, and the fact of his debt. The closing line—“But, sooth to seyn, I noot how men hym calle.”—suggests that, like Chaucer who doesn’t know his name, others may not share the Merchant’s sense of his own importance.

In the Prologue to The Merchant’s Tale itself, we discover that, as well as his debts, the Merchant’s outward prosperity conceals the misery of a two-month-long marriage to a woman he describes as a dominating, cruel shrew. The preceding Clerk’s Tale, about the perfect submissive wife, patient Griselda, has reminded the Merchant of his marital sorrows, and he proceeds to tell a tale that warns men against marriage and confirms the treachery of wives. However, as it unfolds The Merchant’s Tale ironically reveals even more about the foolishness of husbands, and specifically about old men’s propensity for sexual self-deception. The foolishness of husbands is another lesson that the reader is invited to apply to the Merchant himself.

Genre of The Merchant’s Tale

Like The Miller’s Tale, The Merchant’s Tale is a fabliau, a comic tale in verse. Both Tales treat the betrayal of old husbands by beautiful young wives. Both show a fascination with the lower part of the body—the functions of sex and excretion. However, while The Miller’s Tale moves to its comic dénouement at lightning speed, The Merchant’s Tale reaches an equally dramatic dénouement, involving acrobatic sex in a pear tree, at a leisurely pace. The Merchant’s Tale is a complex word tapestry, a masterpiece that yields its insights and intricacies to patient study. Like The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, it includes long rhetorical passages and digressions that enrich its meaning. Satire is sterner than in the two comic tales that we have so far discussed, and severe, even grim, morals emerge. Unlike that of Chanticleer and Pertelote, the Merchant’s is not a “merry” Tale. All three main characters, the old husband January, his young wife May, and even Damian her lover, occasionally arouse the reader’s sympathy or pity, but these feelings are fleeting. It’s fair to conclude that like The Miller’s Tale, The Merchant’s Tale is cynical about human nature, especially when sex is the issue. May and Damian are heartless, hypocritical and calculating in their relentless pursuit of physical gratification. January’s maturity should have made him wise. His tragedy is that he rejects the truth, even when he sees it with his own eyes. He’s self-deluded as much as he’s deceived by May.

Structure of The Merchant’s Tale

The following outline may assist your reading:

PART ONE: THE WEDDING OF JANUARY AND MAY

Section I: January and Marriage

• January’s decision to marry (p. 357)
• The Merchant’s ironic praise of marriage, attributed at the end (p. 361) to January

Section II: Preparations for January’s Marriage

• January wants a wife under twenty (pp. 361-62)
• The counselling scene: Placebo (flatterer: “I will please”) and Justinus (honest, i.e. just man, or cynic?)
• The search for a wife and the choosing of May: “her rank was not so great, to tell the truth” ; January’s expectations (p. 367)
• Justinus’s opinion of January’s choice

Section III: The Wedding and Wedding Night

• Wedding ceremony (p. 369)
• Wedding feast; the introduction of Damian
• Wedding night: January’s preparations and May’s reactions

PART TWO: DAMIAN’S COURTSHIP OF MAY

Section IV: Success of Damian’s Courtship

• Damian’s sickness and May’s visit
• January’s love-making; May’s consent to Damian; Damian’s recovery

Section V: Preparation for Climax

• January’s Garden of Love
• January’s blindness and his jealousy; May’s frustration
• Damian’s frustration; May’s plot;–who can frustrate the slyness of lovers?

PART THREE: THE DÉNOUEMENT

Section VI: First Half of Dénouement

• January takes May to Garden
• January and May’s covenant: if she’s faithful, she’ll inherit all
• May gestures to Damian to hide in pear tree

Section VII: Hiatus

• Pluto’s and Proserpina’s debate and agreement: he’ll restore January’s sight, but she’ll give May her answer (pp. 383-385)

Section VIII: Second Half of Dénouement

• May and Damian’s consummation in the pear tree
• January sees; May answers
• January’s continuing blindness.

The Merchant’s Tale: Three Major Themes

THEME 1: COURTSHIP AND LOVE

This Tale scrutinises myths associated in the Middle Ages with “noble” or courtly love and courtship. The Tale encourages readers to free themselves from subjection to these myths, and to see things clearly–how such myths can be used to disguise greed for sex, or for money and status. Although January’s and May’s marriage observes all the outward forms–a wedding ceremony, a wedding feast, and a wedding night–neither partner treats the other with real love and respect. The Merchant’s Tale exposes self-deception and hypocrisy in the rituals of both courtly love and marriage.

Medieval Courtly Love

May’s name suggests the youthfulness of springtime in England, as opposed to January’s wintry old age. It evokes the romantic associations of reverdie explained on this site in discussions of Emily and spring in The Knight’s Tale. When the Merchant sums up May’s beauty at her wedding feast, he focuses on this aspect of courtly love conventions: “Yet thus much of her beauty I will say/ That she was like the brightest morn of May/ With every grace and pleasure in her glance” (p. 370).

The unfolding narrative undermines May’s pose as a young and beautiful courtly lady. Courtly ladies were supposed to be chaste and cruel to their suitors, but May yields to Damian’s advances with unseemly haste. An ironic comment from the narrator (pp. 376-77) draws attention to the contrast. Some female tyrants would never have bestowed their grace, he says, but “[p]ity flows swiftly in a noble mind.” Furthermore, Chaucer (or the Merchant) hints at the sexual drive that governs May’s actions, such as the thrusting of Damien’s love letter into her bosom; her throwing of his letter into the privy; their hand-squeezing; and May’s plotting and treachery that lead inexorably to their consummation in the pear tree.

Damian is likewise a parody of a courtly lover. Ravished by May’s loveliness at her wedding, he takes to his bed weeping and complaining (371), burning in Venus’s fire; but the promise of May’s “grace” brings an instantaneous recovery—“gone was all trace of malady and sorrow” (p. 377). By demonstrating Damian’s subservience to January, and January’s affection for him, Chaucer invites a harsh judgment of Damian’s sycophancy and treachery.

Finally, the walled garden, where January performs with May “anything they had not done in bed” (pp. 377-78), is a lustful parody and distortion of courtly love gardens. Such a garden features in The Romance of the Rose, an allegory central to the courtly love tradition, and a poem that Chaucer translated from the French original. Emily’s garden in The Knight’s Tale is a noble example. January’s garden is introduced by a reference to Priapus, the god of gardens, who is depicted in painting and sculpture with a grotesque erect phallus. By contrast, the courtly lover’s goal in striving to enter the garden of the lady’s regard is the lady’s love.

Biblical Love References

The Song of Solomon (or in some translations, Song of Songs) in the Old Testament is one of the world’s great love poems, often quoted in the Middle Ages in both religious and secular contexts. Bible exegetes allegorised the lover’s courtship in the Song as the love between Christ and his Church, or between Christ and the aspiring individual soul. When January leads May into the garden at the beginning of the Merchant’s Tale’s dénouement, he expresses his love in the Song’s beautiful words (2:10-12): “Rise up, my love…The turtle’s voice is heard, my dove…/Winter is gone…/Come out with me, bright-eyes, my columbine,/ O how far fairer are thy breasts than wine!…” (380-81). The chasm between the Song’s erotic and spiritual idealism and January, who is old, blind, jealous and sexually obsessed, would have revolted Chaucer’s early audiences, and as modern readers we need to be aware of it. Chaucer is showing how just far the socially and ecclesiastically approved love between January and May falls short of the Biblical love ideal.

THEME 2: MARRIAGE

A. Disillusioned Husbands

A disillusioned husband himself, the Merchant tells of two other disillusioned husbands.

The first is January’s wise counsellor Justinus, who has married “the constantest, the meekest soul alive,” yet knows “where the shoe pinches” (p. 365). Justinus has a drab, grey view of marriage and wives. That he is a projection of the Merchant’s own experience and feelings is shown by the reference in his closing speech to the Wife of Bath (p. 368). This is a moment when the Merchant intrudes himself into his fictional creation.

The second disillusioned husband is Pluto, who opens the angry debate in the garden with his wife Proserpina by complaining of women’s treachery to men. He uses a quote about female treachery from the wise Hebrew king Solomon, who in his old age foolishly married many heathen wives. Pluto presents Solomon as yet another disillusioned husband.

B. Ironical Praise of Marriage

Beyond these openly negative examples, The Merchant’s Tale begins with a long rhetorical encomium (formal praise) of marriage and wives (pp. 357-60). This is deeply ironic, and means the opposite of what it says: “A wife! Saint Mary, what a benediction!/ How can a man be subject to affliction/ Who has a wife?” (p. 359). This oration uses rhetorical devices such as interrogatio and exclamatio; it argues falsely by an authority (Theophrastus) and examples (Judith, Abigail, Esther) to prove the bliss of married life.

“Wed in Haste”…

The satire of marriage continues in the Merchant’s description of January’s wedding (pp. 369-72). The speed of the ceremony, driven by January’s eagerness to go to bed with May, is like an express train rushing towards a tunnel, or over a cliff. The description compares May with Biblical examples of faithful wives, implying that May is unlikely to live up to these examples. The references to Venus and to Hymen, the Roman god of marriage, are mock heroic: these divinities are unlikely guests at this upper middle-class but otherwise ordinary wedding. They function to underline the wedding partners’ incongruity: “Whan tender youth hath wedded stoupyng age,/ Ther is swich myrthe that it may not be written” (p. 370)—another heavily ironic comment. Of course, it’s as early as the wedding that Damian falls in love with May. This marriage is heading for disaster from the very beginning.

January’s Delusion

Although the Merchant has much to say about the treachery of wives, he reveals even more, without meaning to, about January’s folly. This in fact is his central theme, not obvious to the Merchant as narrator, but obvious to his fellow pilgrims and to us as Chaucer’s readers. A promiscuous bachelor until now, January marries May in order to legitimise his lust and beget an heir for his wealth and property (p. 362). He chooses a young wife, because for him marriage is less a sacrament (a sacred union instituted and blessed by God) than a means to continue a lustful lifestyle in which love and respect have played no part. For January, the sacrament of marriage is an insurance policy against hell—a fear never far removed from the medieval mind. Furthermore, and appropriately enough in a tale told by a merchant, this marriage is a mercantile bargain. It’s commerce—January trades his wealth for May’s youthful beauty. Of course similar marriages still happen in the twenty-first century; I’m sure you can think of examples.

Rape in Marriage

Chaucer touches on the theme of rape in marriage. He describes January’s sexual antics, his elderly body and his prurience: “The bristles of his beard were thick as stubble,/ Much like a dog-fish skin, and sharp as briars,/ Being newly shaved to sweeten his desires./ He rubbed his chin against her tender cheek…” (p. 372). No wonder it takes May four days of seclusion to recover from the wedding night: “For every labourer must have time to rest” (p. 373).

Marital rape recurs as a sub-theme associated with Pluto and Proserpina. According to this myth, which explains the origin of the seasons, Pluto, god of the underworld, abducted and raped the young Proserpina when she was gathering flowers. Proserpina reigns as queen of the underworld for six months of the year (autumn and winter), but spends the remaining six months in the world above with her mother Ceres, goddess of the earth (spring and summer). Pluto (old, and associated with winter) is a close parallel for January. Proserpina (young, and associated with spring) is a close parallel for May.

January’s Garden and the Garden of Eden

Finally, the Merchant evokes the archetype and ideal of Christian marriage—Adam and Eve in Paradise before the Fall—as another ironic parallel to the marriage of January and May. He refers to paradise at least four times: for example, at the moment of consummation: “Fast in the arms of January lay/ His mate, his paradise, his fresh young May” (p. 372).

The Adam and Eve story in the Book of Genesis recurs as a visual icon in the Tale’s dénouement. January’s garden of lust is a parody of the Eden of perfect love. The pear tree is a parody of the Tree of Knowledge—the knowledge of good and evil forbidden to humans. Damian stands for the serpent Satan, lurking in the tree and tempting Eve. A deeply misogynist irony introduced by the Merchant is that, far from being tempted by the serpent as Eve was, May in fact leads the serpent, Damian, into sin. January is Adam, holding the tree trunk and helping May to climb up over him. The tree branches above him represent the cuckold’s (betrayed husband’s) horns now spouting from his forehead. The Merchant’s many reminders of God’s founding of marriage in Eden throughout his Tale’s climax underline the distance between January’s and May’s marriage and this sacred ideal.

THEME 3: JUDGMENT AND WISDOM versus BLINDNESS AND FOLLY

The Merchant’s Tale extends the theme of judgment that we traced in the Knight’s characterisation of Theseus. However, whereas Theseus is a mostly positive role model for a wise judge, one who comes close to Plato’s ideal of a “philosopher king,” January is a study in folly. His folly is even worse because he has reached what should be the age of wisdom. Driven by lust and the fear of hell, he chooses to be led by the flatterer, Placebo, whose name means “I will please.” He rejects the warnings of Justinus, whose name implies justice and judicious counsel. January is self-deceived from the beginning. Firstly concerning his sexual prowess, he compares himself, significantly in view of later events, to a green tree (pp. 362-63). After he’s decided that May is the girl for him, he worries that he may miss out on heaven after death through having had his heaven on earth through marriage to May (pp. 367-68). Justinus cursorily dismisses this worry as extreme folly (p. 368).

January’s folly is compounded even further in the Tale’s dénouement. After seeing with his own eyes Damian having sex with May in the pear tree: “Anyhow, in it went!” (p. 387), January chooses to accept the lying explanation that May “wrestled” with a man in the pear tree in order to cure her husband’s blindness. January decides that he didn’t see what he saw. At the moment of being cured of his physical blindness, he therefore embraces an even worse mental and emotional blindness. The closing image that we have is of January tenderly stroking May’s womb where Damian’s child may already be nestling—the child who was part of the January’s motive for marriage, and who may now inherit all his wealth.

The Merchant’s Tale and The Republic

I’d like to close this survey of The Merchant’s Tale by making a connection with Plato’s Republic. Both The Merchant’s Tale and Socrates’ allegory of the cave concern the human perception of truth. January’s tragedy is that he chooses to be deluded by the false shadows of May’s and Damian’s fidelity, in preference to embracing the truth that Socrates considered an ultimate value, an Ideal. January therefore chooses to remain, figuratively speaking, in the company of those chained in the dark in Plato’s cave. He fails to take even the first painful step on the upward pilgrimage that would bring him through the “field of true thought,” to the Good as the final destination.

III. The Pardoner’s Tale

Harry Bailly the Host again requests a “merry” tale, so that he can forget the Tale just told by the Physician, in which a virtuous girl unjustly perishes. However the other pilgrims fear that the Pardoner will respond by telling a dirty joke, and demand instead a tale with a moral. The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale that follow are an exercise in arrogance and bravado. The Pardoner uses the pilgrimage as a stage for demonstrating his preaching techniques, the purpose of which is to defraud ordinary churchgoers. This is a case of the outsider hitting back at the group that excludes him. The basic irony of what follows is that, in demonstrating his preaching prowess, the Pardoner unconsciously reveals his own evil and the certainty of his damnation.

The Biblical text on which the Pardoner bases his preaching is Radix malorum est cupiditas (I Timothy 6.10): “The love of money is the root of all evil.” He chooses this text in the expectation that those who listen to his preaching will avoid cupiditas by donating their money to himself. The lecture on the General Prologue on this site suggests that the pilgrims’ relationship to caritas and its opposite, cupiditas, is a leading criterion by which Chaucer ranks them. The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale confirm that he is a victim of the cupiditas against which he preaches.

The irony is that in defrauding others, the Pardoner commits a deeper fraud against himself. While the Pardoner’s self-deception and inevitable damnation are obvious to all his listeners—i.e. to both the Canterbury pilgrims and to everyone who listens to or reads Chaucer’s poem—he himself is oblivious to his doom. In the words of Shakespeare’s Porter in Macbeth, the Pardoner is on “the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire.” Because his life is ruled by cupiditas, he is damned just as surely as the three rioters in his Tale. The difference in knowledge and understanding between the Pardoner and his two groups of listeners is the basis of a savage, but morally satisfying, irony.

The Pardoner’s arrogance first appears when he forces the company of pilgrims to wait for him to begin, while he drinks ale and eats cake (240). In his Prologue he demonstrates his sales-pitch for the false relics that he proffers to parishioners, all certified genuine by the Pope or a Cardinal. In his preaching, he congratulates himself on the trick whereby he affirms that women in the congregation who don’t buy his relics must have committed the major sin of adultery (p. 242). Some will therefore come forward to buy, for fear of what their neighbours may think if they don’t.

Set in Flanders, The Pardoner’s Tale first introduces a company of young clubbers and bar-flies. The Pardoner seizes the opportunity to show how he preaches against vices associated with clubs and pubs. The vices are:

• lust and murder, excited by drink, as in the cases of Lot and Herod;
• gluttony, the sin which drove Adam and Eve from paradise;
• drunkenness as a branch of gluttony (Gluttony and drunkenness are further aspects of his preaching that the Pardoner fails ironically to apply to himself, when he is clearly subject to them—ale and cake.);
• gambling;
• swearing (a vice of Harry Bailly).

The narrative proper begins when the Pardoner singles out three rioters (party-goers to excess) as his leading characters (p. 250). It ends with the agonising death by poison of the two surviving rioters (p. 256). The story is an exemplum, or tale told to teach a moral, and again it’s a tale that the Pardoner uses in his preaching. Although no exact source is known for The Pardoner’s Tale, the plot originated in the Far East at the time of the Buddha (fifth or sixth century BC), and similar stories circulated in Europe for centuries before Chaucer. Like The Miller’s Tale, also discussed on this site, The Pardoner’s Tale is neat and nifty: hardly a word is wasted. However, unlike the comic, lusty, and life-affirming Miller’s Tale, The Pardoner’s Tale is a chilling moral warning focused on “a privy thief, they call him Death.”

The opening describes the sudden death of the rioters’ drinking crony, followed by the tavern boy’s report of a thousand dead in the Black Death, and the publican’s account of a large village only a mile away now completely emptied of people. Chaucer here captures the fear that haunted his generation, when Death in the form of plague lurked in likely and unlikely places, striking down the young, the rich and the healthy just as often as the old and poor. A wealth of images of Death, usually personified as a skeleton bearing a spear, hourglass or scythe, survives from the plague centuries of the late Middle Ages. Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of the “Death of the Miser” captures the traditional association between avarice (i. e. cupiditas) and Death that Chaucer develops in this Tale. Of course, the chief internal irony of The Pardoner’s Tale is that the three rioters’ drunken pact to search out and kill Death leads them inexorably to their own deaths—they do indeed find Death, and cupiditas is the force that drives their quest.

Elsewhere on this site I’ve argued that the General Prologue shows love of gold as having brought some of Chaucer’s pilgrims to moral poverty and inner division. This proposition reaches its logical culmination in The Pardoner’s Tale, when the gold to which the Old Man directs the rioters turns out to be, in truth, the Death that was the first goal of their quest. After the rioters find the gold, they give up looking for Death, because, though they haven’t yet recognised him, they’ve found him. The cache of golden florins causes first their bodily deaths and then the damnation of their souls. The Pardoner’s Tale preaches that to centre your life on gold is to centre it on damnation.

The three rioters are unnamed and hardly differentiated. We are told that the “proudest” of them speaks rudely to the Old Man; that the “wickedest” proposes the drawing of lots for the task of buying food and wine in town; that the “youngest” wins the draw and goes off; the “wickedest” then plots with his companion to murder the “youngest” on his return. Meanwhile the “youngest” visits the apothecary and poisons the wine meant for his two comrades. It’s true to say that these characters are not complex human beings, but functions of the plot and the moral. Most readers feel that their deaths are fitting and poetically  just.

Chaucer enriches the traditional tale by telling it with much economy in the enriching context of the pilgrimage, and by making the brilliantly-drawn Pardoner the teller. Chaucer’s other main contribution to the traditional story is the Old Man (pp. 251-252). This figure does not occur in any surviving analogue or source for The Pardoner’s Tale, so Chaucer probably invented him. On one level his significance is obvious: he represents old age. He longs for death; he yearns to sink down into the embrace of his mother earth, but the will of God debars him. His view of Death is the opposite to the rioters’—the Old Man thinks of Death as God’s servant and sees timely death is a blessed relief from suffering. The Old Man is wise—he has a unique spiritual understanding. He alone knows where the golden treasure is hidden and he alone knows that it is Death. He directs the rioters to it along a crooked path, symbolising a loss of direction, which leads into a dark wood, symbolising moral and spiritual blindness. Perhaps, then, the Old Man does not wish the rioters well after all? Possibly he is an agent of the Devil? On the other hand, despite the rioters’ rude and disrespectful behaviour, he offers them God’s blessing and prays for their reformation. Scholars and critics have tried to resolve these contradictions, but, in some respects the Old Man remains an enigma.

Aftermath to The Pardoner’s Tale

The Pardoner ends by recapitulating his warnings against the list of sins that his Tale exemplifies. He offers his Prologue and Tale to the pilgrims as a sample of his preaching, and in a rare moment of honesty prays for Christ’s pardon on them, because “that is best, I won’t deceive you” (p. 257). Then he contemptuously offers to sell them his relics and pardons! However, he finally overreaches himself by singling out the Host to come forward first, as being “The most enveloped of you all in sin.” Angry, Harry Bailly responds with a gross insult about the Pardoner’s testicles, which draws attention to his lack of manliness, presumed impotence, and ambiguous gender. Infuriated, the Pardoner at last lapses into silence.

CONCLUSION

I hope that you’ve enjoyed this roller coaster survey of three of the best Canterbury Tales. In this lecture we’ve moved from the light-hearted brilliance of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, through the Merchant’s exposure of self-deception and marital selfishness, to bleak warnings about cupiditas, Death and damnation in The Pardoner’s Tale. Together with our study on this website of the General Prologue, The Knight’s Tale and The Miller’s Tale, I hope that this introduction has demonstrated the versatility of Chaucer’s poetry, and indicated a few of the many strands of meaning and tradition that he wove together to create The Canterbury Tales.