The Canterbury Tales

Here, the Knight interrupts the Monk, telling him everyone gets the point by now and adding that, while some love to hear stories of how the mighty are fallen, he prefers stories of how the lowly may unexpectedly rise. The Host agrees: It’s no fun to hear endless tales of tragedy. He entreats the Monk to change tack, but the Monk sourly says he’s tired of talking. The Host invites the Priest who accompanies the Nun to tell a tale.

The Nun’s Priest starts by telling of a virtuous widow woman who keeps a fabulous rooster—one Chanticleer, whose favorite wife among seven is the hen Pertelote.

One night, Chanticleer wakes up screaming from a terrible dream of a pursuing fox. Pertelote scolds him, telling him he’s being a coward: Dreams are mere imbalances in the humors, and she’ll cure his nightmares with a laxative. Chanticleer counters that history provides plenty of examples of prophetic dreams and tells of a host of the: from folklore, the life of St. Kenelm, the story of Scipio Africanus, and the Old Testament prophets Daniel and Joseph, among many other classical and religious examples. Thus, he concludes, his dream certainly bodes ill—though his love for Pertelote comforts him. The next day, he seems quite recovered, and lords over his hens as usual.

But all is not well. On a May morning, a fox indeed appears in the widow’s garden. The Nun’s Priest takes this opportunity to discourse on scholarly debates about predestination, referring to St. Augustine and Boethius before returning to the farmyard drama—and then goes on another roundabout excursion to discuss the unreliability of women (blaming Chanticleer for the sentiment).

Chanticleer spies the fox hiding in the cabbages, and crows in alarm. But the fox greets and flatters him, saying he sings just as beautifully as his late father and requesting a command performance. Chanticleer, deceived, obliges, and the fox nabs him while he’s preparing to crow.

The hens’ lament, the Nun’s Priest says, is like the wailing of the conquered women after the fall of Troy. The widow and her daughters, hearing the racket, see the fox carrying Chanticleer off, and rush after him, hollering. Chanticleer, still alive, plays the same trick on the fox that the fox played on him, telling him he should boldly defy his pursuers. When the fox turns to do so, Chanticleer slips free and flies into a tree. The fox tries to flatter him down again, but Chanticleer learned his lesson.

The Nun’s Priest concludes: This may sound like a mere goofy animal tale, but there’s a lesson here.

The Host roundly congratulates him on this story, and notes if the Nun’s Priest weren’t celibate, he’d have his choice of the hens.

The Physician tells a tale taken from the Roman writer Livy. In this story, a man named Virginius has a beautiful, virtuous daughter, Virginia. She’s the picture of perfection—and this, the Physician says, is how she got into trouble. He pauses to warn that those who are put in charge of young people should meet one of two conditions: “Either that you were chaste and did not fail/To guard your honour, or that you were frail,/And therefore, knowing well the ancient dance,/You have forsaken your intemperance/For ever” (234).

A corrupt judge, Appius, lusts after Virginia and hatches a nefarious plan with a local schemer named Claudius. Claudius will bring a case to court claiming Virginia was in fact his servant, stolen from his house when she was a baby. The judge will then award her to Claudius and have his way with her.

Their plot goes just as they intended. Despairing, Virginius calls his daughter and explains he’ll have to kill her to save her from rape. Virginia balks, but accepts her fate and allows her father to behead her. Virginius delivers her severed head to her persecutors. The townspeople throw Appius into prison, where he commits suicide, and are about to hang Claudius when the merciful Virginius begs them to exile him instead.

The Host violently reacts to the sad tale of Virginia, cursing the legal profession up and down for hosting blackguards like Appius. He needs the Physician’s treatment even to recover from this story, he says—or perhaps just a stiff drink, or a more cheerful story. The Pardoner offers to tell a funny one, but his fellow-travelers shout him down, warning that he’s just going to tell a dirty joke and demanding a moral tale instead. The Pardoner says he’ll need to have a snack and a think before he begins.

He starts with a prologue, explaining his own profession. He boasts he’s a snake-oil salesman: He sells relics with wild promises of the magical benefits they confer. He also sells pardons to people too embarrassed by their sins to go to confession—a lucrative scam! And it doesn’t matter to him what happens to their souls after death. He knows he’s a hypocrite as he preaches against the very avarice that controls him, but he seems to take this as a point of pride. The “moral tale” he’s about to tell is one of his insincere sermons.

The Pardoner begins by moralizing against gluttony, avarice, and swearing—using sound effects to drive home his point. He tells the story of three lecherous, gambling, greedy Dutchmen who learn that a shady figure called Death has been killing everyone in town. They decide to deal with this Death guy themselves: “If we can only catch him, Death is dead!” (251).

Before they can carry out their plot, they encounter a mysterious old man, so wizened he looks like he’s dead already—as they rudely tell him. He explains he’s wandered the world looking for someone who will trade him their youth for his age, and since he hasn’t found a taker, he’s doomed to wander still. He does, however, have a tip on where they can find Death: under a tree, just up the road.

The young men find the tree, and a pile of gleaming golden florins beneath it. They rejoice over the treasure and agree that two of them should guard it while one goes back to town for provisions. They draw lots, and the youngest of them has to run the errand. While he’s away, the other two conspire to kill him and divide the treasure between themselves. But he has his own plan, buying potent poison with which to kill them both.

When the youngest man returns, his friends kill him—but then refresh themselves with his poisoned wine and die as well.

The Pardoner concludes his tale with more hypocritical sermonizing, and at last invites his fellow pilgrims to repent and buy indulgences and relics from him to save themselves from a similar terrible fate. The Host is unimpressed: “You’ll have me kissing your old breeches too/And swear they were the relic of a saint/Although your fundament supplied the paint!” (257). The Pardoner is furious at this insult, but the thoughtful Knight steps between Pardoner and Host, persuading them to kiss and make up.