The Canterbury Tales

by Geoffrey Chaucer

  3256 This is a proverbial saying, which is originally found in Old Norse; Singer suggests that it was brought to England by the Vikings (I, 22). It is included in the mid-twelfth-century work known as the Proverbs of Alfred (see Whiting R66) (Pearsall, Variorum: Nun’s Priest’s Tale, p. 221). A Latin version is listed in Walther 3181: ‘Consilium rere fore frigens in muliere’ (‘Believe that a woman’s counsel is cold’).

  3258 See Genesis 3.

  3260–66 Chaucer is mimicking, and in all likelihood ridiculing, the conventional apologies to women made by numerous medieval writers (including Chaucer himself) after having made slighting remarks about them or portrayed them in an unflattering light; for other examples, see J. Mann, Apologies to Women (Cambridge, 1991). Whereas other writers evade responsibility for their remarks by attributing them to previous authors, whose opinion they claim to be merely reporting, Chaucer (in the persona of the Nun’s Priest) nonsensically claims to be reporting the words of the cock, who has said nothing for the last fifty lines.

  3270–72 ‘Physiologus’ (‘the Naturalist’) is the name given to the putative author of the Latin (originally Greek) bestiary, which exists in several versions. As well as real animals and birds, the bestiaries include a number of fabulous creatures (centaurs, griffins, etc.), among which are the sirens, the deceptive songstresses of the sea, who lure sailors to their deaths with their sweet music. The sirens were originally supposed to have a lower body in the shape of a bird, but over time they were also credited with the fish-tail of the mermaid. See F. McCulloch, Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries, rev. edn (Chapel Hill, NC, 1962), pp. 166–9, and S. de Rachewiltz, De Sirenibus: An Inquiry into Sirens from Homer to Shakespeare (New York, 1987), pp. 86–120; for an illustration of this hybrid creature, based on a medieval manuscript, see T. H. White, The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts (New York, 1954), p. 135.

  3279–81 Although not noted in any Chaucer edition to date, the obvious source for this statement is Seneca, Moral Epistles CXXI.18–21, which argues that all animals have a naturally implanted knowledge of which other animals are dangerous to them. This is a very much closer parallel than the passage of Fulgentius (Mythologiae I.6) cited by Riverside, or the passage of Pliny (Natural History X.95.204) cited by Pearsall (Variorum: Nun’s Priest’s Tale, p. 227, where 45 is a mistake for 95).

  3293–4 Boethius, author of the Consolation of Philosophy, also wrote a treatise on music (De institutione musica, ed. G. Friedlein (Leipzig, 1867); tr. by C. M. Bower as Fundamentals of Music (New Haven, CT, 1989)). This work ‘became the basic text in music studied as one of the liberal arts of the quadrivium’ in medieval universities (Bower, p. xiii).

  3297 to my greet ese: That is, the fox has eaten them.

  3312–16 Burnel the Asse: The ass Burnellus (or Brunellus) is the hero of the Mirror for Fools, a late twelfth-century Latin beast epic in elegiac verse, written by Nigel of Longchamp (formerly called Wireker), a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury (Speculum Stultorum, ed. J. H. Mozley and R. R. Raymo (Berkeley, CA, 1960), and tr. G. W. Regenos as The Book of Daun Burnel the Ass (Austin, TX, 1959); abridged tr. by J. H. Mozley, A Mirror for Fools (Oxford, 1961)). On the relation between the Mirror for Fools and NPT, see Headnote. The story referred to here is related to the ass by a travelling companion on the road to Paris (lines 1251–1502). A young boy named Gundulf, while chasing chickens out of the family barn, broke the leg of a chick with his stick. Brooding on this injury for six years, the now grown-up cock finally took his revenge by failing to crow on the day when the boy was due to go to town and be ordained to the priesthood, so that the family slept in and missed the ordination ceremony. The comic implication is that, just as human beings might read stories about their own kind, so animals read beast literature. There is even a suggestion, in the phrase ‘his vers’, that the Mirror for Fools might have been written by Burnellus the Ass, rather than about him.

  3325–8 R. A. Pratt (Speculum, 41 (1966), 619–42, at pp. 635–6) compares these lines with a passage in the Communiloquium of John of Wales.

  3329 ‘Ecclesiaste’ usually refers to the biblical book of Ecclesiasticus (see WB 651 and n. and cf. n. to Mil 3530), but the verses that have been suggested as the subject of this reference (11:31; 12:10, 11, 16; 27:26) concern deception rather than flattery. K. Sisam (ed., The Nun’s Priest’s Tale (Oxford, 1927), pp. 52–3) suggested that ‘Ecclesiaste’ referred to the author of all the ‘Solomonic’ books of the Bible, and proposed Proverbs 29:5 (which is quoted at Mel 1179 among other warnings against flattery) as the text that Chaucer had in mind. Pearsall (Variorum: Nun’s Priest’s Tale, p. 234) suggests Proverbs 26:28, 28:23 as further possibilities.

  3334 ‘Russell’ means ‘reddish’, and is thus an appropriate name for the fox. In beast epic the fox is usually called Reynard, and it is the squirrel who is called ‘Rousseau’ or ‘Rousel’, and the name ‘Rossel’ is sometimes given to one of the fox’s sons; see Pratt, Speculum, 47 (1972), 652–3. Pratt suggests that in avoiding the name Reynard, Chaucer was trying to keep his own tale separate from the French Reynard-cycle and its many descendants.

  3338 This comment on the inescapable nature of destiny is swiftly and comically belied by the fact that Chauntecleer escapes death with ease – whereupon the narrator substitutes a moralizing reflection on the sudden changeability of Fortune (3403–4). For a serious view of the relation of destiny and Fortune, as expounded in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and dramatized in Chaucer’s more serious works, see n. to Kn 1663–9, and Mann, ‘Chance and Destiny’, esp. pp. 106–7.

  3346 The Latin name for Friday is dies Veneris (‘the day of Venus’); the English name depends on the identification of Venus with the Norse goddess Frig, wife of Woden. Cf. Kn 1534–9.

  3347–51 Gaufred: Geoffrey of Vinsauf, author of a Latin treatise on rhetoric entitled the Poetria Nova, which was composed around 1210. One of Geoffrey’s examples of apostrophe (lines 367–430, tr. Nims, pp. 29–31) is a lament on the death of Richard I (the Lionheart), king of England, who was fatally wounded by an arrow on Friday, 26 March 1199, while fighting in France (see J. Gillingham, Speculum, 54 (1979), 18–41). The lament apostrophizes the ‘tearful day of Venus’ (‘O Veneris lacrimosa dies!’) on which he met his doom. This section of the Poetria Nova was glossed, quoted and anthologized in the Middle Ages (see K. Young, MP, 41 (1944), 172–82).

  3352 Since Richard did not die until eleven days after being wounded, on Tuesday, 6 April, this statement is technically incorrect.

  3356–9 Ilioun … Pirrus … Eneydos: Ilium is the name given to the inner citadel at Troy; see n. to ML 289. Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, broke into the palace of Priam, king of Troy, and killed him. The account of this event in the Aeneid (II.469–558) describes the female shrieks and wails that accompanied it. Cf. ML 288 and n.

  3363–8 The Hasdrubal in question is not the brother of Hannibal, but the Carthaginian leader who was defeated by Scipio Africanus the Younger in 146 BC. When Carthage was taken, he threw himself at Scipio’s feet and asked for pardon; his wife reproached him for his cowardice and cast herself and her children into the flames that were consuming the city. Chaucer certainly knew Jerome’s brief account of her suicide (Against Jov. I.43; cf. Fkl 1399 and n. to Fkl 1367–1456), and may also have read Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings III.2, ext.8.

  3370–72 This (alleged) deed of Nero is also referred to at Mk 2479–81; see n. to Mk 2463–2550.

  3375–82 The witness to a crime had a duty to ‘raise the hue and cry’ – that is, to call out and summon the neighbourhood to help catch the criminal (Hornsby, p. 140). ‘Out!’ and ‘Harrow!’ were both cries used in this context.

  3380 Riverside includes ‘and’ in the exclamation, but this makes it rather ludicrous, as Pearsall notes (Variorum: Nun’s Priest’s Tale, p. 245).

  3381 The pursuit of a fox who is making off with a cock or goose is a frequent subject in medieval English carvings and pictures; see K. Varty, Reynard the Fox (Leicester, 19
67), pp. 37–41 (revised and expanded as Reynard, Renart, Reinaert and Other Foxes in Medieval England: The Iconographic Evidence (Amsterdam, 1999), pp. 36–48). A woman carrying a distaff (cf. NP 3384) is often depicted in these scenes.

  3394–6 Jakke Straw: Jack Straw is named in several contemporary chronicles as one of the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. The rebels killed all the Flemings they could find in London (cf. n. to Co 4357, and see R. B. Dobson, The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London, 1970), pp. 162, 175, 188–8, 201, 206, 210), presumably because they blamed the interference of foreign financial interests for their own troubles. Since Chaucer was living in London at the time, he very probably witnessed much of the violence at first hand (Pearsall, Life, p. 146). For a discussion of his likely reactions, see G. Kane, in Lexis and Texts in Early English: Studies Presented to Jane Roberts, ed. C. J. Kay and L. M. Sylvester (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 2001), pp. 161–71. The noise made by the rebels seems to have made a great impression on those who heard it; see S. Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, CA, 1994), pp. 206–8. Ian Bishop suggests that Chaucer is here parodying Gower’s Vox Clamantis, in which the Peasants’ Revolt is presented as a furious rampage by various kinds of animals (RES, n.s. 30 (1979), 257–67, at pp. 263–4).

  3415–16 The cock tricks the fox into forgetting that speech is not merely ideational, but has a physical aspect also. The contrast between these two aspects of speech is part of the larger interplay between the verbal and the physical that characterizes both beast fable and beast epic; see Mann, Ysengrimus, pp. 58–77, and A la recherche du Roman de Renart, ed. K. Varty, vol. I (New Alyth, Perth., 1988), pp. 135–62, esp. pp. 146–55.

  3422 out of the yerd*] into this yerd El Hg. It is difficult to see how the El/Hg reading could have arisen, but sense rules it out.

  3426–35 The cock-and-fox story is unusual in having two concluding morals: beast fables usually end in one moral, while the episodes of beast epic have none at all. Because of this narrative duality, which means that each animal is both trickster and tricked, this particular story resists the moral closure characteristic of beast fable, and can be adapted to the comic world of beast epic.

  3441–2 The reference is to Romans 15:4. Cf. RR 15171–3, tr. Horgan, p. 235.

  3443 The Testament of Jean de Meun ends with a similar exhortation to the reader to take the wheat and blow away the chaff (lines 2111–12). Cf. ML 701–2 and n., Pars 35–6, LGW G 312, 529.

  3446 thy*] his El Hg. The switch from ‘thy’ in line 3444 to ‘his’ in the El/Hg version of line 3446 is puzzling; even more so is the parenthetical ‘As seyth my lord’ in line 3445. It is not clear which lord (human or divine?) is in question, and the third-person phrase oddly turns a direct address to God into something like a quotation. The reference may be to Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane (Matthew 26:39, 42), but a marginal gloss in El and Hg reads ‘[El only: scilicet] dominus Archiepiscopus Cantuariensis’ (‘that is, the lord Archbishop of Canterbury’). As head of the Church, the Archbishop would be the Priest’s ultimate superior, but attempts to find a similar prayer formula associated with the contemporary Archbishop, William Courtenay, have been unsuccessful. For discussion of the problems and various proposed solutions, see Pearsall, Variorum: Nun’s Priest’s Tale, pp. 257–8, and P. J. C. Field, MÆ, 71 (2002), 302–6. I have emended ‘his’ to ‘thy’ in order to achieve surface coherence with the minimum of interference.

  THE NUN’S PRIEST’S EPILOGUE

  3447–62 The epilogue appears in nine MSS (Manly and Rickert IV, 516), but not in El or Hg; the text given here is based on Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd.4.24. Riverside prints this epilogue in the text of CT, in square brackets; the Textual Notes (p. 1133) accept the general view that it is a link later cancelled by Chaucer and reworked into the Monk’s Prologue (cf. NP 3451 with Mk 1945). Although these lines are generally of a much higher quality than the clearly spurious links produced by scribes who wished to fill gaps between the tales (see Riverside Textual Notes for examples), the conventionality and nonspecificity (‘another’) of the last two lines have a distinctly scribal character, and it may be that the whole passage is a clever imitation of Chaucer’s manner by an unusually talented scribe. For a full review of the various arguments advanced by scholars, see Pearsall, Variorum: Nun’s Priest’s Tale, pp. 87–91. Because of its doubtful authenticity, the Epilogue is set here in italics.

  THE SECOND NUN’S PROLOGUE

  As elsewhere in CT, Chaucer switches to rhyme royal for this religious tale (see n. to ML 96). The content of the Second Nun’s Prologue is a composite of several elements, some with obvious sources, some not. The first part (lines 1–28) develops the conventional idea that ‘the devil finds work for idle hands to do’ (see next note). C. Brown, rejecting Skeat’s suggestion that it was inspired by Jean de Vignay’s introduction to his French translation of the Golden Legend, pointed out that ‘similar remarks upon Idleness were frequently expressed by authors and translators when they took pen in hand’, and went on to give examples (MP, 9 (1911), 1–16, at pp. 1–4). There follows an Invocation to Mary (29–84), the first part of which is largely based on Dante’s Paradiso, XXXIII.1–21 (see nn. to SN 30–56). The interpretation of Cecilia’s name in the last part of the Prologue (85–119) is taken, as a marginal gloss in El and Hg makes clear, from the life of Cecilia in the Golden Legend of Jacopo da Varazze (Jacobus de Voragine), called in the gloss ‘Januensis’, ‘of Genoa’, as at the opening of his work; Varazze is on the Genoese Riviera and Jacopo was archbishop of Genoa from 1292 to 1298.

  1 norice unto vices: Proverbial. See the Distichs of Cato I.2, and for various formulations of this idea in English, see Whiting I6; cf. also the quotation of Ecclesiasticus 33:29 at Mel 1589.

  2–3 In the Romance of the Rose (573–92, tr. Horgan, p. 11), the female door-keeper who admits the Lover into the garden of Pleasure (Deduit) is called Idleness (Oiseuse). Cf. Kn 1940 and Pars 714.

  19 seen: This is the reading of El/Hg (and other MSS). Manly and Rickert and Riverside prefer the alternative reading ‘syn’, but this extends the sentence into the next stanza and makes the syntax over-complicated, as well as blurring the thought. The idea here is that even without the fear of death or hell, people can see that idleness produces nothing and is parasitic on the work of others.

  27 In hagiographical and patristic writings, the roses conventionally signify martyrdom and the lilies chastity. See J. L. Lowes, PMLA, 26 (1911), 315–23, and PMLA, 29 (1914), 129–33. Cf. SN 220–21.

  30 St Bernard of Clairvaux (c. 1090–1153) was known for his devotion to the Virgin; however, the invocation in lines 36–56 is not based on any of his writings but on the hymn to Mary that Dante places in his mouth in Paradiso XXXIII.1–21. See following notes.

  36 Cf. Dante, Paradiso XXXIII.1: ‘Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio’ (‘Virgin mother, daughter of thy son’; tr. Singleton). The repetition of ‘thou’, which occurs throughout the Invocation but is specially noticeable in this stanza, is a stylistic pattern influenced by classical and biblical models; see P. M. Clogan, MedHum, n.s. 3 (1972), 213–40, at p. 222.

  37 welle of mercy: The Latin equivalent of this phrase, ‘fons pietatis’, is a frequent appellation of Mary in Latin hymns (Salzer, Sinnbilder, pp. 323, 521; for further examples in Latin, French and Italian, see J. L. Lowes, MP, 15 (1917), 193–202, at p. 194 and n. 4).

  39 The line translates Dante, Paradiso XXXIII.2: ‘umile e alta più che creatura’.

  40–42 These lines echo Dante, Paradiso XXXIII.4–6: ‘tu se’ colei che l’umana natura | nobilitasti sì, che’l suo fattore | non disdegnò di farsi sua fattura’ (‘thou art she who didst so ennoble human nature that its Maker did not disdain to become its creature’; tr. Singleton).

  43–5 Cf. Dante, Paradiso XXXIII.7–9: ‘Nel ventre tuo si raccese l’amore, | per lo cui caldo ne l’etterna pace | cosìè germinato questo fiore’ (‘In thy womb was rekindled the Love under whose warmth this flower in the
eternal peace has thus unfolded’; tr. Singleton). However, as C. Brown pointed out (MP, 9 (1911), 6), the wording is closer to the opening of a poem attributed to Venantius Fortunatus (Opera Poetica, ed. F. Leo, (Berlin, 1881), p. 385): ‘Quem terra pontus aethera | colunt adorant praedicant, | trinam regentem machinam | claustrum Mariae baiulat’ (‘Mary’s cloister [her womb] bears the burden of the ruler of the threefold cosmos, whom earth, sea and air worship, adore and proclaim’).

  50–51 These lines echo Dante, Paradiso XXXIII.19–21: ‘In te misericordia, in te pietate, | in te magnificenza, in te s’aduna | quantunque in creatura è di bontate’ (‘In thee is mercy, in thee pity, in thee munificence, in thee is found whatever of goodness is in any creature’; tr. Singleton).