The Canterbury Tales

by Geoffrey Chaucer

  781 Proverbial; see Whiting C384.

  889–91 Avicenna, the important Arabic philosopher (980–1037), wrote a Book of the Canon of Medicine which treats of poisons in Book IV, Fen 6.

  fen: Arabic ‘fann’, a division of a science; the term is used for the chapters of Avicenna’s Canon.

  922 For the role of the papacy in authorizing pardons, see n. to GP 669.

  946–50 R. F. Green has suggested that the Host’s words allude to a medieval comic tale (found in numerous versions) in which a gullible husband is persuaded that his wife’s lover’s breeches are a saint’s relic, and is made to show his reverence by kissing them (SAC, 15 (1993), 131–45).

  951 crois … Seint Eleine: The finding of the Holy Cross at Jerusalem by St Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, is related in the Golden Legend (I, no. 68).

  952–3 This equation of testicles and relics may derive from the Romance of the Rose, where the Lover reproves Reason for using the word ‘testicles’ (‘coilles’) instead of a euphemism, and she defends herself: ‘if you object … that the words are ugly and base, I tell you before God who hears me that if, when I gave things the names that you dare find fault with and condemn, I had called testicles relics and relics testicles, then you who thus attack and reproach me would tell me instead that relics was an ugly, base word’ (7076–85, tr. Horgan, p. 108).

  THE SHIPMAN’S TALE

  The narrative outline of the Shipman’s Tale belongs to a story-type known as ‘The Lover’s Gift Regained’ (SA, pp. 439–46); a story of this sort appears in Boccaccio’s Decameron (VIII.1), and even though there is no direct evidence that Chaucer knew it (cf. Headnote to ClT), it is at least a close enough analogue to furnish a useful comparison. Text and translation are given in SA2 II, along with a slightly less close parallel from the Decameron (VIII.2); both stories are readily available in McWilliam’s translation of the Decameron). Boccaccio’s brief narrative contains little beyond the mechanics of the plot; the Shipman’s Tale, in contrast, is enriched with a vivid picture of life in a merchant’s household, and also greatly expands the account of the way in which the wife and her lover come to a mutual agreement. The dialogue in which the wife agrees to have sex with the monk Dom John, while he agrees to pay her one hundred francs for the privilege, without any of this being explicitly stated, is a masterpiece of verbal disguise (98–208). In Boccaccio’s version, the lover – not a monk but a German soldier – who is genuinely in love with the wife, is rudely awakened to her true nature by her demand for money, and takes his revenge by tricking her out of the payment. In the Shipman’s Tale, neither the monk nor the wife is in any doubt as to the self-interested nature of their relationship, and instead of being left as the humiliated dupe of the lover’s trick at the end of the tale, the wife takes the trickery a stage further by claiming that she has already spent the amount given her by the monk on her own ‘array’, which will enhance her husband’s status, and asking him to take payment in the form of the marriage ‘debt’ – that is, in sex (see n. to WB 129–30). The situation thus achieves equilibrium through reciprocal deception, in a kind of comic parody of the equilibrium achieved through patience and generosity in the Franklin’s Tale. The façade of deception is never disrupted, as befits the household of a merchant whose creditworthy status depends on keeping up appearances (12–13, 230–34, 418–21).

  1 Saint-Denis, a town eight miles north of Paris, was famous for its abbey, rebuilt in splendid style in the twelfth century by Abbot Suger; it became the burial-place of French kings. It was also a good place for a merchant to live, since the fairs of Champagne were an international centre of commerce, credit, and currency exchange; one of these fairs was located at neighbouring Lendit (see Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. J. R. Strayer, 13 vols. (New York, 1982–9), s.v. Fairs of Champagne).

  9 On this proverbial expression, see n. to Mch 1315.

  12 The use of ‘us’ in this line implies that the speaker is a woman; this has led scholars to suggest that ShT was originally assigned to the Wife of Bath, and re-allocated to the Shipman as Chaucer’s plans for CT developed (see n. to ML 1163–90).

  38 as glad … as fowel of day: A proverbial comparison. See Whiting F561, and cf. Kn 2437 and Sh 51.

  51 See preceding n.

  55 Bruges (Dutch Brugge) was one of the great weaving towns of medieval Flanders and an important trading and banking centre; from about 1350 to 1450 it was ‘the commercial capital of Europe’ (Barron, ‘England and the Low Countries’, pp. 2–11). A great trading fair was held there every year in April–May; see J. A. van Houtte, Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Economy and Society (Leuven, 1977), pp. 81–108, esp. pp. 88–9.

  65–6 On monastic granges, see n. to Mil 3668. The monk acts as an administrative officer overseeing the landed estates which provided the monastery with its income (see n. to GP 166).

  83 counting-bord: Medieval merchants made their calculations with jettons or counters placed on a table marked with squares, each vertical column representing a different monetary value. For a full account of the methods of calculations, with illustrations of counting-tables, see F. P. Barnard, The Casting-Counter and the Counting-Board (Oxford, 1916).

  114–23 In view of the sexual energy displayed by the merchant on his return from Paris (375–81), the wife’s insinuation that she is sexually deprived seems to be simply a way of indicating to the monk that she is open to advances from other quarters. Cf. Sum 1827–31 and n.

  131 The monk is carrying his breviary because it contained the texts of the eight liturgical ‘Hours’ which he (like other religious) was obliged to recite at fixed hours daily; see n. to Mil 3655.

  135–40 ‘I swear … never to betray a word of what you tell me – [swearing this] not because of the bonds of loyalty obtaining between kindred, but out of personal affection and trust.’ The syntactic relation between lines 139–40 and what precedes them has the looseness characteristic of speech, but it is not so problematic as to warrant R. F. Green’s suggestion that lines 139–40 should be repunctuated so as to form part of the narrator’s following comments (ChauR, 26 (1991), 95–7).

  148 St Martin (c. 316–97) began life as a Roman soldier, but left the army to become a monk and, later, bishop of Tours (Golden Legend, II, 292–300).

  151 St Denis (d. c. 250), bishop of Paris, is the patron saint of France. The abbey of Saint-Denis (see n. to Sh 1) was built over his tomb.

  171 Proverbial; see Whiting F345.

  172 Since the narrator has already told us of the merchant’s ‘largesse’ (22), the wife’s claim that he is niggardly seems to be a blatant falsehood, which is not meant to convince the monk, but rather to provide a façade behind which their tacit negotiations can be conducted (cf. n. to Sh 114–23).

  174 For a similar list of desirable qualities in a husband, see NP 2912–17.

  181 The franc was a French gold coin, introduced in the fourteenth century, worth about 37–9 English pennies (Grierson, Coins, pp. 142–3; P. Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange (London, 1986), p. 191); 100 francs was therefore equivalent to £15–£16 sterling, a considerable sum. Chaucer’s annual income in 1389 has been estimated at £36 10s (Pearsall, Life, p. 210).

  194 Geneloun: Ganelon, stepfather of Roland, the hero of the Song of Roland, betrayed his stepson by nominating him as leader of the rearguard army in the Emperor Charlemagne’s withdrawal from Spain, and arranging for it to be ambushed and destroyed by the pagan king Marsile (557–616). As punishment for his treachery, he was torn apart by four horses (3962–74). Cf. Mk 2389 and NP 3227.

  204 al stille and softe: In Riverside, these words are included in the monk’s speech. The punctuation adopted here is suggested by J. Mandel, PQ, 70 (1991), 99–102.

  206 chilindre: This portable sun-dial took the form of an upright cylinder with a conical top (North, Chaucer’s Universe, pp. 111–13).

  214 Qui la*] Who ther El; Who ther Hg (‘ys’ is inserted over a caret mark). Both El and Hg read ‘qui
la’ in the margin; Manly and Rickert conjecture that in Chaucer’s original ‘qui la’ stood in the text, with ‘Who ther’ as a marginal gloss, and that this was read by later scribes as an intended substitution (IV, 497). This seems the likeliest explanation, despite N. Blake’s arguments in favour of ‘Who ther’ as the textual reading and ‘Qui la’ as the marginal gloss (New Perspectives in Chaucer Criticism, ed. D. M. Rose (Norman, OK, 1981), pp. 223–40, at pp. 228–32). If ‘Who ther’ was the original reading, there would have been no point in supplying a French gloss.

  221–3 Fasting before the Eucharist became a common practice from the fourth century onwards. These lines also imply that the merchant, like many pious laymen in the fourteenth century, kept a resident chaplain to celebrate mass in his house; even if the monk were in priestly orders (as some but not all monks were), he would have been prohibited from administering the sacraments to the laity without special permission (H. A. Kelly, ChauR, 28 (1993), 5–22, at p. 9).

  227 Seint Ive: See n. to Sum 1943.

  228 tweye*] ten El x. Hg. The use of Roman numerals makes the confusion of ‘x’ and ‘ii’ easier, especially after the preceding ‘xii’, and the merchant’s gloomy tone would suggest that the rate of success that causes him such concern is two out of twelve rather than ten out of twelve. The CT scribes also freely substituted their own figures: twelve out of twenty, twelve out of ten hundred, two out of twenty. It is possible, however, that ‘ten out of twelve’ is correct, and that Chaucer is making fun of the professional pessimism exhibited by merchants, even in the face of success.

  230–34 This passage has given difficulties. M. Copland (MÆ, 35 (1966), 11–28, at p. 19) takes ‘pleye a pilgrimage’ to be a euphemism for ‘die’. It seems more likely that the merchant mentions pilgrimage because pilgrims customarily settled their debts and made a will before setting out, leaving their property in the protection of the Church (cf. PPl VI.83–5, and see Sumption, Pilgrimage, pp. 168–9). The merchant thus thinks of death and pilgrimage alike as signalling the end of his worldly activity.

  259 Seint Austin: St Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo, was one of the early Church Fathers.

  300 On medieval apprentices, see n. to Co 4365–6.

  309 Monks, like other clergymen in the Middle Ages, were cleanshaven, and monastic life prescribed regular shaving and renewal of their tonsures (Harvey, Living and Dying, pp. 132–3).

  330–34 The merchant has bought (unspecified) goods at the fair in Bruges, and has bound himself by a ‘reconissaunce’ (a written pledge of repayment) to pay 20,000 shields for them. K. S. Cahn (SAC, 2 (1980), 81–119, at pp. 116–17) claims that the shield was not a real coin but a notional monetary unit used in foreign exchange (see, however, n. to GP 278). But since the merchant has made his purchase in Bruges, the obvious interpretation of this passage is that the ‘sheelde’ is the Flemish écu (in Dutch, schild), a gold coin issued by Louis of Mâle, count of Flanders (1346–84), in imitation of the French coin of the same name (see O. Elsen, Revue belge de numismatique et de sigillographie, 141 (1995), 37–183, at pp. 84–7, 141–2, and the statistical tables on pp. 172, 180). Since the merchant is French, he is to pay for the shields in French francs. He already has most of the sum required, but since the goods were dearer than he anticipated (328), he has to borrow more from friends in Paris (James Murray and Peter Spufford, personal communications).

  355 On St James, see n. to Rv 4264.

  359 In medieval law, a man who delivered goods to another was advised to take and leave a token as proof of delivery (M. F. Braswell, ChauR, 22 (1988), 295–304, at p. 301).

  366–8 By repaying the loan, the merchant redeems the bond or ‘reconissaunce’ that he had given as security for the shields. G. Joseph (ChauR, 17 (1983), 341–57, at p. 348) suggests that the merchant makes his repayment to the Paris branch of the Lombard bank that lent him the 20,000 shields in Bruges (see n. to Sh 330–34). All the major Italian banking companies had permanent branches at Bruges.

  Lumbards:On the Lombards, see R.de Roover, Money, Banking and Credit in Mediaeval Bruges (Cambridge, MA, 1948), pp. 99–108; the term was, however, used as a virtual synonym for ‘Italian’. Money-lending was common, despite the fact that, strictly speaking, it was forbidden by the Church.

  416 The wife is punning on ‘taille’ (‘tally’, a scored wooden stick kept by a creditor as a record of sums owing) and ‘tail’ (in the sense ‘arse’, ‘genitals’); for the latter, see MED tail n, 1b (c).

  THE SHIPMAN–PRIORESS LINK

  435 corpus dominus: The correct form would be ‘corpus domini’, ‘the Lord’s body’. As an uneducated layman, the Host has only an imperfect grasp of Latin. For other examples of the Host’s garbled oaths, see Pard 310, 314, Mk 1892, 1906, and nn.

  441 Seint Austin: On St Augustine, see n. to Sh 259.

  THE PRIORESS’S PROLOGUE

  Rubric Domine dominus noster: ‘O Lord, our Lord’. These are the opening words of Psalm 8; see next n.

  453–9 These lines echo verses 2–3 (AV 1–2) of Psalm 8: ‘O Lord our Lord, how admirable is thy name in the whole earth! For thy magnificence is elevated above the heavens. Out of the mouth of infants and of sucklings thou hast perfected praise … ’ These verses were used (in reverse order) as the Introit of the Mass of the Holy Innocents (M. P. Hamilton, in Chaucer: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. E. Wagenknecht (New York, 1959), pp. 88–97, at p. 90).

  468 The allusion is to the bush, burning but not consumed by fire, out of which God’s voice spoke to Moses (Exodus 3:1–6). In Christian tradition, the burning bush was interpreted as a prefiguration of the virgin birth (Salzer, Sinnbilder, pp. 12–14).

  472 Fadres Sapience: That is, Christ. Medieval theologians assigned particular qualities to the three persons of the Trinity. God the Father was identified as Power, God the Son as Wisdom, and God the Holy Ghost as Love. See, for example, PPl XVI.30, 36, and Julian of Norwich, Shewings, ed. G. R. Crampton (Kalama-zoo, MI, 1994), ch. 58, 2408–11. The inscription on the gate to Dante’s Hell proclaims it to have been made by ‘The Divine Power … | The Supreme Wisdom, and the Primal Love’ (Inferno III.5–6).

  474–80 This stanza echoes lines 50–56 of SNPr, which are themselves based on Dante, Paradiso XXXIII.16–21.

  THE PRIORESS’S TALE

  The Prioress’s Tale belongs to the literary genre known as Miracles of the Virgin, brief narratives recounting the miraculous assistance granted by the Virgin Mary to her devotees or suppliants (who may be sinners, criminals or Jews, as well as devout Christians). Collections of such stories ‘took Europe by storm in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, reached their fullest extension in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and survived as a living literature here and there till the seventeenth century’ (R. W. Southern, Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies, 4 (1958), 176–216, at p. 178). For some ME examples, see B. Boyd, ed., The Middle English Miracles of the Virgin (San Marino, CA, 1964). As in the tales of the Man of Law, Clerk and Second Nun, the solemn tone of the Prioress’s Tale is sustained by the use of rhyme royal (see n. to ML 96), which is continued into the following link.

  The story of the boy murdered by Jews for singing a song in praise of Mary survives in many different versions; most of them were printed and discussed by C. Brown in A Study of the Miracle of Our Lady Told by Chaucer’s Prioress (London, 1910). His findings were reproduced, incorporating some supplementary material, in SA, pp. 447–66, followed by texts or summaries of the tales which offer the closest resemblances to Chaucer’s version (Brown’s Group C). The texts in Brown’s Group C, along with some newly identified analogues, are reproduced with parallel translations in SA2 II. See also M. H. Statler, PMLA, 65 (1950), 896–910. Two of these tales are included in Kolve and Olson, pp. 418–27. Broadly speaking, the other tales (Brown’s Groups A and B) differ from the story told by Chaucer in the following respects: (1) the murdered boy is buried by the Jews (rather than being thrown into a latrine), but having been discovered by his singing, he i
s dug up alive and unharmed; (2) the Jews are not punished for their crime, since they are so impressed by the boy’s miraculous resurrection that they are converted and baptized; (3) the song in praise of Mary which is sung by the boy is not ‘Alma redemptoris’ but ‘Gaude Maria’ or another Marian chant. ‘Gaude Maria’ ends with the line ‘Erubescat Iudaeus infelix, qui dicit Christum Joseph semine esse natum’ (‘Let the cursed Jew blush, who says that Christ was born of the seed of Joseph’), which several of these versions represent as having provoked the Jews to the murder.

  As far as one can tell in the absence of a clearly identifiable direct source, Chaucer himself seems to have been responsible for setting the Prioress’s Tale in Asia (see n. to Pri 488), and also for making the boy as young as seven, thus increasing the pathos of the tale and foregrounding Mary’s role, not only as miracle-worker, but as heavenly mother, as is evident especially in her final words of maternal comfort (667–9). Chaucer also gave the tale greater solemnity and wider significance by weaving into it allusions to Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents and to the liturgy of their feast; see Hamilton (cited in n. to Pri 453–9), and also nn. to Pri 453–9, 574, 578, 580–85 and 627. For the Proper (the elements that changed according to the liturgical occasion) of the Mass for this feast, see The Sarum Missal, ed. J. W. Legg (Oxford, 1916; repr. 1969), pp. 32–3.