Chaucer’s disciple Thomas Hoccleve (1367–1426) testified that Chaucer seide alweie
the best. This courtesy sharpens his irony, often directed at professional avarice. He
says of the Lawyer, ‘Nowher so bisy a man as he ther nas, / And yet he semed bisier
than he was.’ The Doctor is ‘esy of dispense’ [slow to spend money] – for ‘He kepte
that [what] he wan in pestilence’ [Plague]. Chaucer’s casual comments, usually
innocent, are sometimes deadly. He wrote of ‘the smylere with the knyf under the
cloke’. He is an ironist, not a satirist; his comedy flickers between human sympathy
and an absolute morality. His Knight, Parson and Plowman are ideal: defender of the
faith, pastor, worker. His Clerk of Oxford, too, is an ideal:
Noght o word spak he more than was neede. one
And that was seyd in forme and reverence,
And short and quyk and ful of hy sentence; ethical truth
Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche, Tending to
And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.The first tale, the Knight’s, is a chivalric romance in which the princes Palamon
and Arcite fall for the fair Emelye, whom they espy from their prison as she roams
and sings in a garden below. They escape and fight over her, a fight stopped by
Theseus, who ordains a tournament in which Emelye’s hand is the prize. Before it,
Arcite prays to Mars for Victory, Palamon to Venus for Emelye, Emelye to Diana not
to marry; or, if she must, to wed ‘hym that moost desireth me’. When Arcite has won,
Emelye gives him a friendly look. His prayer has been answered. But Saturn sends an
infernal fury, which makes Arcite’s horse throw him in the moment of triumph; he
dies in Emelye’s arms. After years of mourning, Palamon and Emelye marry, on
Theseus’s advice. Chivalry tries once more to mend the injustice of the world.
After this attempt to settle a love-contest without bloodshed, the Host asks the
Monk to speak, but has to give way to the drunken Miller. In the first funny story in
English, the attractions of Alysoun drive three men mad, two young Oxford clerks
and John, her old husband.The Miller makes fun of the Knight’s tale, also provok-
ing the Ree ve (a carpenter) by making John (also a carpenter) incredibly stupid. The
Reeve tells how a Miller is doubly cuckolded by two Cambridge students. The Cook
then tel ls of a London apprentice dismissed for riotous living. He moves in with a
friend whose wife kept a cookshop for the sake of appearances but swyved for her
sustenance, the last line of the Fragment: ‘she fucked for a living’. The pilgrimage,
with its April aspiration, communal devotion to the blisful saint, dawn start and
chivalric romance, falls to sexual comedy in Oxford and farce in Cambridge. Instead
ofCanterbury or Jerusalem celestial, it has returned to the City, and to a knocking-
shop. Love-contest gives way to love-making, then to sexual congress, then to sexual
commerce. The Prodigal Son has rolled to the bottom of the stairs, and Chaucer
br eaks off.
The tone goes up in the Man of Law’s Fragment II, down with the Wife of Bath
in Fragment III, up with the Clerk in IV and down with the Merchant, then up in V
with the Squire and the Franklin. In the second half of the Tales,moral sentence
predominates over the mirthful solaasof the Shipman, ‘Sir Thopas’ and the Nun’s
Priest. In VIII, a Canon’s Yeoman rides up to tell the pilgrims about his master’s
fraudulent alchemy. In IX, near ‘a litel toun / Which that ycleped is Bobbe-up-and-
doun’, the drunken Cook falls from his horse, and in X the Parson knits up the
unravelling pilgrimage, telling how human faults can be forgiven and mankind
saved.
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY 63irony Saying one thing but
meaning another.
satire Attacking vice or folly
by means of ridicule or
sarcasm.