Plot Overview
General Prologue
At the Tabard Inn, a tavern in Southwark, near
London, the narrator joins a company of twenty-nine pilgrims. The
pilgrims, like the narrator, are traveling to the shrine of the martyr
Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The narrator gives a descriptive
account of twenty-seven of these pilgrims, including a Knight, Squire,
Yeoman, Prioress, Monk, Friar, Merchant, Clerk, Man of Law, Franklin,
Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer, Tapestry-Weaver, Cook, Shipman,
Physician, Wife, Parson, Plowman, Miller, Manciple, Reeve, Summoner,
Pardoner, and Host. (He does not describe the Second Nun or the Nun’s
Priest, although both characters appear later in the book.) The Host,
whose name, we find out in the Prologue to the Cook’s Tale, is Harry
Bailey, suggests that the group ride together and entertain one another
with stories. He decides that each pilgrim will tell two stories on the
way to Canterbury and two on the way back. Whomever he judges to be
the best storyteller will receive a meal at Bailey’s tavern, courtesy
of the other pilgrims. The pilgrims draw lots and determine that the
Knight will tell the first tale.
The Knight’s Tale
Theseus, duke of Athens,
imprisons Arcite and Palamon, two knights from Thebes (another city in
ancient Greece). From their prison, the knights see and fall in love
with Theseus’s sister-in-law, Emelye. Through the intervention of a
friend, Arcite is freed, but he is banished from Athens. He returns in
disguise and becomes a page in Emelye’s chamber. Palamon escapes from
prison, and the two meet and fight over Emelye. Theseus apprehends them
and arranges a tournament between the two knights and their allies,
with Emelye as the prize. Arcite wins, but he is accidentally thrown
from his horse and dies. Palamon then marries Emelye.
The Miller’s Prologue and Tale
The Host asks the Monk to tell the next tale,
but the drunken Miller interrupts and insists that his tale should be
the next. He tells the story of an impoverished student named Nicholas,
who persuades his landlord’s ***y young wife, Alisoun, to spend the
night with him. He convinces his landlord, a carpenter named John, that
the second flood is coming, and tricks him into spending the night in a
tub hanging from the ceiling of his barn. Absolon, a young parish
clerk who is also in love with Alisoun, appears outside the window of
the room where Nicholas and Alisoun lie together. When Absolon begs
Alisoun for a kiss, she sticks her rear end out the window in the dark
and lets him kiss it. Absolon runs and gets a red-hot poker, returns to
the window, and asks for another kiss; when Nicholas sticks his bottom
out the window and farts, Absolon brands him on the buttocks.
Nicholas’s cries for water make the carpenter think that the flood has
come, so the carpenter cuts the rope connecting his tub to the ceiling,
falls down, and breaks his arm.
The Reeve’s Prologue and Tale
Because he also does carpentry, the Reeve
takes offense at the Miller’s tale of a stupid carpenter, and counters
with his own tale of a dishonest miller. The Reeve tells the story of
two students, John and Alayn, who go to the mill to watch the miller
grind their corn, so that he won’t have a chance to steal any. But the
miller unties their horse, and while they chase it, he steals some of
the flour he has just ground for them. By the time the students catch
the horse, it is dark, so they spend the night in the miller’s house.
That night, Alayn seduces the miller’s daughter, and John seduces his
wife. When the miller wakes up and finds out what has happened, he tries
to beat the students. His wife, thinking that her husband is actually
one of the students, hits the miller over the head with a staff. The
students take back their stolen goods and leave.
The Cook’s Prologue and Tale
The Cook particularly enjoys the Reeve’s Tale,
and offers to tell another funny tale. The tale concerns an apprentice
named Perkyn who drinks and dances so much that he is called “Perkyn
Reveler.” Finally, Perkyn’s master decides that he would rather his
apprentice leave to revel than stay home and corrupt the other servants.
Perkyn arranges to stay with a friend who loves drinking and gambling,
and who has a wife who is a prostitute. The tale breaks off,
unfinished, after fifty-eight lines.
The Man of Law’s Introduction, Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue
The Host reminds his fellow pilgrims to waste
no time, because lost time cannot be regained. He asks the Man of Law
to tell the next tale. The Man of Law agrees, apologizing that he
cannot tell any suitable tale that Chaucer has not already told—Chaucer
may be unskilled as a poet, says the Man of Law, but he has told more
stories of lovers than Ovid, and he doesn’t print tales of incest as
John Gower does (Gower was a contemporary of Chaucer). In the Prologue
to his tale, the Man of Law laments the miseries of poverty. He then
remarks how fortunate merchants are, and says that his tale is one told
to him by a merchant.
In the tale, the Muslim sultan of Syria
converts his entire sultanate (including himself) to Christianity in
order to persuade the emperor of Rome to give him his daughter,
Custance, in marriage. The sultan’s mother and her attendants remain
secretly faithful to Islam. The mother tells her son she wishes to hold a
banquet for him and all the Christians. At the banquet, she massacres
her son and all the Christians except for Custance, whom she sets
adrift in a rudderless ship. After years of floating, Custance runs
ashore in Northumberland, where a constable and his wife, Hermengyld,
offer her shelter. She converts them to Christianity.
One night, Satan makes a young knight sneak
into Hermengyld’s chamber and murder Hermengyld. He places the bloody
knife next to Custance, who sleeps in the same chamber. When the
constable returns home, accompanied by Alla, the king of Northumberland,
he finds his slain wife. He tells Alla the story of how Custance was
found, and Alla begins to pity the girl. He decides to look more deeply
into the murder. Just as the knight who murdered Hermengyld is swearing
that Custance is the true murderer, he is struck down and his eyes
burst out of his face, proving his guilt to Alla and the crowd. The
knight is executed, Alla and many others convert to Christianity, and
Custance and Alla marry.
While Alla is away in Scotland, Custance gives
birth to a boy named Mauricius. Alla’s mother, Donegild, intercepts a
letter from Custance to Alla and substitutes a counterfeit one that
claims that the child is disfigured and bewitched. She then intercepts
Alla’s reply, which claims that the child should be kept and loved no
matter how malformed. Donegild substitutes a letter saying that Custance
and her son are banished and should be sent away on the same ship on
which Custance arrived. Alla returns home, finds out what has happened,
and kills Donegild.
After many adventures at sea, including an
attempted rape, Custance ends up back in Rome, where she reunites with
Alla, who has made a pilgrimage there to atone for killing his mother.
She also reunites with her father, the emperor. Alla and Custance return
to England, but Alla dies after a year, so Custance returns, once
more, to Rome. Mauricius becomes the next Roman emperor.
Following the Man of Law’s Tale, the Host asks
the Parson to tell the next tale, but the Parson reproaches him for
swearing, and they fall to bickering.
The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale
The Wife of Bath gives a lengthy account of
her feelings about marriage. Quoting from the Bible, the Wife argues
against those who believe it is wrong to marry more than once, and she
explains how she dominated and controlled each of her five husbands. She
married her fifth husband, Jankyn, for love instead of money. After
the Wife has rambled on for a while, the Friar butts in to complain
that she is taking too long, and the Summoner retorts that friars are
like flies, always meddling. The Friar promises to tell a tale about a
summoner, and the Summoner promises to tell a tale about a friar. The
Host cries for everyone to quiet down and allow the Wife to commence her
tale.
In her tale, a young knight of King Arthur’s
court rapes a maiden; to atone for his crime, Arthur’s queen sends him
on a quest to discover what women want most. An ugly old woman promises
the knight that she will tell him the secret if he promises to do
whatever she wants for saving his life. He agrees, and she tells him
women want control of their husbands and their own lives. They go
together to Arthur’s queen, and the old woman’s answer turns out to be
correct. The old woman then tells the knight that he must marry her.
When the knight confesses later that he is repulsed by her appearance,
she gives him a choice: she can either be ugly and faithful, or
beautiful and unfaithful. The knight tells her to make the choice
herself, and she rewards him for giving her control of the marriage by
rendering herself both beautiful and faithful.
The Friar’s Prologue and Tale
The Friar speaks approvingly of the Wife of
Bath’s Tale, and offers to lighten things up for the company by telling a
funny story about a lecherous summoner. The Summoner does not object,
but he promises to pay the Friar back in his own tale. The Friar tells
of an archdeacon who carries out the law without mercy, especially to
lechers. The archdeacon has a summoner who has a network of spies
working for him, to let him know who has been lecherous. The summoner
extorts money from those he’s sent to summon, charging them more money
than he should for penance. He tries to serve a summons on a yeoman who
is actually a devil in disguise. After comparing notes on their
treachery and extortion, the devil vanishes, but when the summoner tries
to prosecute an old wealthy widow unfairly, the widow cries out that
the summoner should be taken to hell. The devil follows the woman’s
instructions and drags the summoner off to hell.
The Summoner’s Prologue and Tale
The Summoner, furious at the Friar’s Tale,
asks the company to let him tell the next tale. First, he tells the
company that there is little difference between friars and fiends, and
that when an angel took a friar down to hell to show him the torments
there, the friar asked why there were no friars in hell; the angel then
pulled up Satan’s tail and 20,000 friars came out of his ass.
In the Summoner’s Tale, a friar begs for money
from a dying man named Thomas and his wife, who have recently lost
their child. The friar shamelessly exploits the couple’s misfortunes to
extract money from them, so Thomas tells the friar that he is sitting
on something that he will bequeath to the friars. The friar reaches for
his bequest, and Thomas lets out an enormous fart. The friar complains
to the lord of the manor, whose squire promises to divide the fart
evenly among all the friars.
The Clerk’s Prologue and Tale
The Host asks the Clerk to cheer up and tell a
merry tale, and the Clerk agrees to tell a tale by the Italian poet
Petrarch. Griselde is a hardworking peasant who marries into the
aristocracy. Her husband tests her fortitude in several ways, including
pretending to kill her children and divorcing her. He punishes her one
final time by forcing her to prepare for his wedding to a new wife. She
does all this dutifully, her husband tells her that she has always
been and will always be his wife (the divorce was a fraud), and they
live happily ever after.
The Merchant’s Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue
The Merchant reflects on the great difference
between the patient Griselde of the Clerk’s Tale and the horrible shrew
he has been married to for the past two months. The Host asks him to
tell a story of the evils of marriage, and he complies. Against the
advice of his friends, an old knight named January marries May, a
beautiful young woman. She is less than impressed by his enthusiastic
***ual efforts, and conspires to cheat on him with his squire, Damien.
When blind January takes May into his garden to copulate with her, she
tells him she wants to eat a pear, and he helps her up into the pear
tree, where she has *** with Damien. Pluto, the king of the faeries,
restores January’s sight, but May, caught in the act, assures him that
he must still be blind. The Host prays to God to keep him from marrying a
wife like the one the Merchant describes.
The Squire’s Introduction and Tale
The Host calls upon the Squire to say
something about his favorite subject, love, and the Squire willingly
complies. King Cambyuskan of the Mongol Empire is visited on his
birthday by a knight bearing gifts from the king of Arabia and India. He
gives Cambyuskan and his daughter Canacee a magic brass horse, a magic
mirror, a magic ring that gives Canacee the ability to understand the
language of birds, and a sword with the power to cure any wound it
creates. She rescues a dying female falcon that narrates how her consort
abandoned her for the love of another. The Squire’s Tale is either
unfinished by Chaucer or is meant to be interrupted by the Franklin, who
interjects that he wishes his own son were as eloquent as the Squire.
The Host expresses annoyance at the Franklin’s interruption, and orders
him to begin the next tale.
The Franklin’s Prologue and Tale
The Franklin says that his tale is a familiar
Breton lay, a folk ballad of ancient Brittany. Dorigen, the heroine,
awaits the return of her husband, Arveragus, who has gone to England to
win honor in feats of arms. She worries that the ship bringing her
husband home will wreck itself on the coastal rocks, and she promises
Aurelius, a young man who falls in love with her, that she will give her
body to him if he clears the rocks from the coast. Aurelius hires a
student learned in magic to create the illusion that the rocks have
disappeared. Arveragus returns home and tells his wife that she must
keep her promise to Aurelius. Aurelius is so impressed by Arveragus’s
honorable act that he generously absolves her of the promise, and the
magician, in turn, generously absolves Aurelius of the money he owes.
The Physician’s Tale
Appius the judge lusts after Virginia, the
beautiful daughter of Virginius. Appius persuades a churl named Claudius
to declare her his slave, stolen from him by Virginius. Appius
declares that Virginius must hand over his daughter to Claudius.
Virginius tells his daughter that she must die rather than suffer
dishonor, and she virtuously consents to her father’s cutting her head
off. Appius sentences Virginius to death, but the Roman people, aware
of Appius’s hijinks, throw him into prison, where he kills himself.
The Pardoner’s Introduction, Prologue, and Tale
The Host is dismayed by the tragic injustice
of the Physician’s Tale, and asks the Pardoner to tell something merry.
The other pilgrims contradict the Host, demanding a moral tale, which
the Pardoner agrees to tell after he eats and drinks. The Pardoner tells
the company how he cheats people out of their money by preaching that
money is the root of all evil. His tale describes three riotous youths
who go looking for Death, thinking that they can kill him. An old man
tells them that they will find Death under a tree. Instead, they find
eight bushels of gold, which they plot to sneak into town under cover of
darkness. The youngest goes into town to fetch food and drink, but
brings back poison, hoping to have the gold all to himself. His
companions kill him to enrich their own shares, then drink the poison
and die under the tree. His tale complete, the Pardoner offers to sell
the pilgrims pardons, and singles out the Host to come kiss his relics.
The Host infuriates the Pardoner by accusing him of fraud, but the
Knight persuades the two to kiss and bury their differences.
The Shipman’s Tale
The Shipman’s Tale features a monk who tricks a
merchant’s wife into having *** with him by borrowing money from the
merchant, then giving it to the wife so she can repay her own debt to
her husband, in exchange for ***ual favors. When the monk sees the
merchant next, he tells him that he returned the merchant’s money to his
wife. The wife realizes she has been duped, but she boldly tells her
husband to forgive her debt: she will repay it in bed. The Host praises
the Shipman’s story, and asks the Prioress for a tale.
The Prioress’s Prologue and Tale
The Prioress calls on the Virgin Mary to guide
her tale. In an Asian city, a Christian school is located at the edge
of a Jewish ghetto. An angelic seven-year-old boy, a widow’s son,
attends the school. He is a devout Christian, and loves to sing Alma Redemptoris
(Gracious Mother of the Redeemer). Singing the song on his way through
the ghetto, some Jews hire a murderer to slit his throat and throw him
into a latrine. The Jews refuse to tell the widow where her son is,
but he miraculously begins to sing Alma Redemptoris, so the
Christian people recover his body, and the magistrate orders the
murdering Jews to be drawn apart by wild horses and then hanged.
The Prologue and Tale of Sir Thopas
The Host, after teasing Chaucer the narrator
about his appearance, asks him to tell a tale. Chaucer says that he only
knows one tale, then launches into a parody of bad poetry—the Tale of
Sir Thopas. Sir Thopas rides about looking for an elf-queen to marry
until he is confronted by a giant. The narrator’s doggerel continues in
this vein until the Host can bear no more and interrupts him. Chaucer
asks him why he can’t tell his tale, since it is the best he knows, and
the Host explains that his rhyme isn’t worth a turd. He encourages
Chaucer to tell a prose tale.
The Tale of Melibee
Chaucer’s second tale is the long, moral prose
story of Melibee. Melibee’s house is raided by his foes, who beat his
wife, Prudence, and severely wound his daughter, Sophie, in her feet,
hands, ears, nose, and mouth. Prudence advises him not to rashly pursue
vengeance on his enemies, and he follows her advice, putting his foes’
punishment in her hands. She forgives them for the outrages done to
her, in a model of Christian forbearance and forgiveness.
The Monk’s Prologue and Tale
The Host wishes that his own wife were as
patient as Melibee’s, and calls upon the Monk to tell the next tale.
First he teases the Monk, pointing out that the Monk is clearly no poor
cloisterer. The Monk takes it all in stride and tells a series of
tragic falls, in which noble figures are brought low: Lucifer, Adam,
Sampson, Hercules, Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Zenobia, Pedro of
Castile, and down through the ages.
The Nun’s Priest’s Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue
After seventeen noble “falls” narrated by the
Monk, the Knight interrupts, and the Host calls upon the Nun’s Priest
to deliver something more lively. The Nun’s Priest tells of Chanticleer
the Rooster, who is carried off by a flattering fox who tricks him
into closing his eyes and displaying his crowing abilities. Chanticleer
turns the tables on the fox by persuading him to open his mouth and
brag to the barnyard about his feat, upon which Chanticleer falls out
of the fox’s mouth and escapes. The Host praises the Nun’s Priest’s
Tale, adding that if the Nun’s Priest were not in holy orders, he would
be as ***ually potent as Chanticleer.
The Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale
In her Prologue, the Second Nun explains that
she will tell a saint’s life, that of Saint Cecilia, for this saint set
an excellent example through her good works and wise teachings. She
focuses particularly on the story of Saint Cecilia’s martyrdom. Before
Cecilia’s new husband, Valerian, can take her virginity, she sends him
on a pilgrimage to Pope Urban, who converts him to Christianity. An
angel visits Valerian, who asks that his brother Tiburce be granted the
grace of Christian conversion as well. All three—Cecilia, Tiburce, and
Valerian—are put to death by the Romans.
The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale
When the Second Nun’s Tale is finished, the
company is overtaken by a black-clad Canon and his Yeoman, who have
heard of the pilgrims and their tales and wish to participate. The
Yeoman brags to the company about how he and the Canon create the
illusion that they are alchemists, and the Canon departs in shame at
having his secrets discovered. The Yeoman tells a tale of how a canon
defrauded a priest by creating the illusion of alchemy using sleight of
hand.
The Manciple’s Prologue and Tale
The Host pokes fun at the Cook, riding at the
back of the company, blind drunk. The Cook is unable to honor the
Host’s request that he tell a tale, and the Manciple criticizes him for
his drunkenness. The Manciple relates the legend of a white crow,
taken from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses and one of the tales in The Arabian Nights. In
it, Phoebus’s talking white crow informs him that his wife is cheating
on him. Phoebus kills the wife, pulls out the crow’s white feathers,
and curses it with blackness.
The Parson’s Prologue and Tale
As the company enters a village in the late
afternoon, the Host calls upon the Parson to give them a fable. Refusing
to tell a fictional story because it would go against the rule set by
St. Paul, the Parson delivers a lengthy treatise on the Seven Deadly
Sins, instead.
Chaucer’s Retraction
Chaucer appeals to readers to credit Jesus
Christ as the inspiration for anything in his book that they like, and
to attribute what they don’t like to his own ignorance and lack of
ability. He retracts and prays for forgiveness for all of his works
dealing with secular and pagan subjects, asking only to be remembered
for what he has written of saints’ lives and homilies.