Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales [3 ed.] 9780198821427, 9780198878780, 0198821425

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Oxford Guides to Chaucer The Canterbury Tales

Praise for the Third Edition

‘marked by wit, learning, intelligence, and that rarest of critical virtues, good judgement . . . a genuine guide whose abundant information and good sense make it a sure foundation for series work on The Canterbury Tales. Although especially useful for those, on any level, studying Chaucer for the first time, experienced Chaucerians will find it a helpful companion to The Riverside Chaucer. For teaching or research this is now the first book on The Canterbury Tales to consult after reading the text itself.’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer ‘Cooper’s guide is a more powerful book than any previous aid or introduction to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It presents the lively generous mind of a serious scholar and a sensitive reader.’ Notes & Queries ‘This is a major book with many virtues . . . a book with much to offer its reader.’ Review of English Studies ‘a well-written and reliable guide through a mass of material that largely transcends the limitations of its form to offer critical analysis of lasting value.’ Archiv für das Stadium der neueren Sprachan und Literaturen

Oxford Guides to Chaucer The Canterbury Tales THIRD EDITION ■

HELEN COOPER

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Helen Cooper 1989, 1996, 2023 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 1989 Second Edition published in 1996 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2023940789 ISBN  978–0–19–882142–7 (hbk.) ISBN  978–0–19–887878–0 (pbk.) DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198821427.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION

The idea for a series of guides to Chaucer originated in a sense that medieval studies in general and Chaucerian studies in particular had advanced to a point where a reappraisal of his poetry was both possible and necessary. The three volumes are devoted to the shorter poetry, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Canterbury Tales. We see these books as fulfilling a role comparable to the introduction to a good edition, but at greater length than would be possible there. The kind of line-­by-­line expository material that the notes to an edition would contain is included only where such matters are of wider importance for an understanding of the whole text or where recent scholarship has made significant advances. We hope to provide readers of Chaucer with essential and up-­to-­ date information, with the emphasis falling on how the interpretation of that information advances our understanding of his work; we have therefore gone beyond summarizing what is known to suggest new critical readings. The original plan for the series was designed to provide some degree of consistency in the outline of the volumes, but it was part of the project from the start that there should be plenty of room for each author’s individuality. We hope that our sense of common interests and concerns in our interpretation of Chaucer’s poetry will provide a deeper critical consistency below the diversity. Such a para­dox would, after all, be true to the nature of our subject. 1989 Helen Cooper A. J. Minnis Barry Windeatt

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TO THE THIRD EDITION

I began work on the first edition of this book over thirty years ago, when Oxford University Press, in the person of Kim Scott Walwyn, asked me to draw up a scheme for a series of authoritative guides to Chaucer. I did not quite realize what I was letting myself in for. It may be that she did not realize either; but she remained consistently encouraging, patient, and broad-­ minded. The Press found excellent people to replace her after her sadly early death, and I worked with them for the lightly revised second edition and this more thoroughly revised third. I thank them too; but I am more than happy to remember Kim’s part in bringing to birth both the series and my own volume within it. To have asked any of my medievalist friends to comment on the draft of such an extensive work would have been taking unfair advantage of their willingness, so all its original errors were on my own head. Over the years, however, various colleagues have noticed mistakes that I have been able to correct; and James Simpson waived his right to anonymity as reader for this new edition, and I am very grateful for his comments. Other colleagues—­Alexander Murray (for history), Colin Day (for chemistry), Charlotte Morse, John Alford, Edwin Craun, Ruth Morse—­commented on other sections of the original; and V. A. Kolve, and more recently Elizabeth Robertson and Richard Firth Green, gave me access to work of theirs that had not yet been published. Over the years I have also profited more broadly from the conferences of the New Chaucer Society and the many conversations I have had there. The undergraduates who have cross-­ examined me on the Tales in tutorials, and urged fine readings of their own, have provided a stimulus to excellence of which I can only have fallen short. Of my graduate students, I should give particular thanks to Megan Murton, whose work is acknowledged in the course of this book. My greatest debt, however, was to my husband, for his unstinting encouragement of my career when such things were far from being taken for granted, and for his help with word processing when that was still in its infancy. That there were far fewer infelicities than in the original drafts I owe to his sharp eyes. He helped me every page of the way, and remained sufficiently interested in the

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Tales in spite of it all to reread them at the end. He would be pleased, and as a scientist slightly bemused, that a publication of this kind could still be updated so as to have value after so long. The last word of thanks, however, must go to my daughters, for their tolerating Chaucer as an extra member of the household for so much of their young lives, and for bearing with a mother who, as the youngest described it, ‘sits upstairs writing and writing and writing. Her book has taken far too long.’

CONTENTS

Abbreviations xv Introduction 1 Bibliographical Note  6 The Canterbury Tales 9 Date 9;  Text 11;  Genre 14;  Sources and Analogues 15;  Structure 24;  Themes 26  Style: Language, Rhetoric, and Prosody  33 FRAGMENT I The General Prologue  39 Date and Text  39;  Genre  40;  Sources and Analogues  42;  Structure  44;  Themes and Style: A Guided Tour of the General Prologue 46,  The Knight 47,  The Squire 49,  The Yeoman 50,  The Prioress  50,  The Monk  52,  The Friar  53,  The Merchant  55,  The Clerk  56,  The Sergeant of Law  57,  The Franklin  58,  The Guildsmen  61,  The Cook  62,  The Shipman  62,  The Doctor of Physic  63,  The Wife of Bath  64,  The Parson  66,  The Ploughman  67,  The Miller  68,  The Manciple  69,  The Reeve  70,  The Summoner  71,  The Pardoner  72,  The Tabard  75 The Knight’s Tale  77 Date 77;  Text 78;  Genre 79;  Sources and Analogues 81,  1. Boccaccio: The Teseida  81,  2. Boethius  84,  3. Minor Sources: Statius, the Ovidian Tradition, the Roman de la Rose, Dante, English Romance 87;  Structure 89;  Themes 92;  A Note on Astrology 100;  The Tale in Context  101;  Style  104

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CONTENTS

The Miller’s Tale  109 Prologue  109;  Date and Text  111;  Genre  112;  Sources and Analogues 113;  Structure 116;  Themes 118;  The Tale in Context 120;  Style 122 The Reeve’s Tale  126 Prologue  126;  Date and Text  127;  Genre  127;  Sources and Analogues 128;  Structure 130;  Themes 131;  The Tale in Context 133;  Style 134 The Cook’s Tale  137 Prologue  137;  Date and Text  138;  Genre  138;  Sources and Analogues  139;  Structure, Themes, and Style  139;  The Tale in Context 140 FRAGMENT II The Man of Law’s Tale  143 Introduction  143;  Date and Text  145;  Genre  147;  Sources and Analogues 148;  Structure 150;  Themes 151;  The Tale in Context  155;  Style  157;  Epilogue: A Textual Note  159 FRAGMENT III The Wife of Bath’s Prologue  161 Date and Text  161;  Genre  163;  Sources and Analogues  164;  Structure  170;  Themes  172;  The Prologue in Context  176;  Style 178 The Wife of Bath’s Tale  180 Date and Text  180;  Genre  180;  Sources and Analogues  181;  Structure 185;  Themes 186;  The Tale in Context 188;  Style 189 The Friar’s Tale  192 Prologue  192;  Date and Text  192;  Genre  193;  Sources and Analogues 193;  Structure 195;  Themes 196;  The Tale in Context 198;  Style 199 The Summoner’s Tale  201 Prologue  201;  Date and Text  201;  Genre  202;  Sources and Analogues 202;  Structure 204;  Themes 204;  The Tale in Context 206;  Style 207

Contentsxi

FRAGMENT IV The Clerk’s Tale  209 Prologue  209;  Date and Text  210;  Genre  212;  Sources and Analogues 213;  Structure 216;  Themes 218;  The Tale in Context 222;  Style 225 The Merchant’s Tale  228 Prologue  228;  Date and Text  229;  Genre  230;  Sources and Analogues 230;  Structure 233;  Themes 234;  The Tale in Context 238;  Style 240 FRAGMENT V The Squire’s Tale  245 Prologue  245;  Date and Text  245;  Genre  247;  Sources and Analogues 248;  Structure 250;  Themes 251;  The Tale in Context 254;  Style 256 The Franklin’s Tale  259 The Ending of the Squire’s Tale: The Squire–Franklin Link  259;  Date and Text  260;  Genre  261;  Sources and Analogues  262;  Structure  264;  Themes  265;  The Tale in Context  271;  Style 273 FRAGMENT VI The Placing of the Fragment  277 The Physician’s Tale  278 Date and Text  278;  Genre  278;  Sources and Analogues 280;  Structure 281;  Themes 282;  The Tale in Context 286;  Style 288;  The Physician–Pardoner Link 290 The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale  291 Date and Text  291;  The Prologue: Sources and Analogues  291;  The Prologue: Structure, Themes, and Style  293;  The Tale: Genre 295;  Sources and Analogues 295;  Structure 297;  Themes  299;  The Tale in Context  303;  Style  304 FRAGMENT VII The Placing of the Fragment  309

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The Shipman’s Tale  310 Date, Attribution, and Text  310;  Genre, Sources, and Analogues 311;  Structure 312;  Themes 313;  The Tale in Context 315;  Style 316 The Prioress’s Tale  319 The Shipman–Prioress Link  319;  Date and Text  319;  Genre  320;  Sources and Analogues  321;  Structure  324;  Themes  325;  The Tale in Context  328;  Style 330 The Tale of Sir Thopas 333 Prologue  333;  Date and Text  333;  Genre, Sources, and Analogues  335;  Structure  338;  Themes and Style  339;  The Tale in Context 342 The Tale of Melibee 344 Prologue 344;  Date 346;  Text 347;  Genre 347;  Sources 348;  Structure 350;  Themes 351;  The Tale in Context 355;  Style 356 The Monk’s Tale  359 Prologue 359;  Date 361;  Text 361;  Genre 363;  Sources and Analogues 364;  Structure 367;  Themes 368;  The Tale in Context 371;  Style 372 The Nun’s Priest’s Tale  375 Prologue: Text  375;  Prologue: Themes  376;  Date and Text  377;  Genre  377;  Sources and Analogues  379;  Structure  383;  Themes  385;  The Tale in Context  388;  Style 390;  Endlink 393 FRAGMENT VIII The Placing of the Fragment  395 The Second Nun’s Tale  396 Date  396;  Attribution and Text  396;  Genre, Sources, and Analogues 397;  Structure 398;  Themes 399;  The Tale in Context 401;  Style 404 The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale  407 Date and Text  407;  Prologue  408;  Genre  409;  Sources and Analogues 410;  Structure 412;  Themes 413;  The Tale in Context 416;  Style 417

Contentsxiii

FRAGMENT IX The Manciple’s Tale  421 Prologue  421;  Date and Text  422;  Genre  423;  Sources and Analogues 424;  Structure 426;  Themes 427;  The Tale in Context 430;  Style 432 FRAGMENT X The Parson’s Tale  435 Prologue 435;  Date 438;  Text 439;  Genre, Sources, and Analogues 440;  Themes 443;  The Tale in Context 446;  Style 449 Taking Leave: Chaucer’s ‘Retractions’ 451 Imitations of the Canterbury Tales 1400–1615  455 Filling in the Gaps: The Cook’s and Squire’s Tales  456;  Tales for the Pilgrimage: Beryn, The Siege of Thebes, Two Ploughman’s Tales  458;  The Non-­Canterbury Tales: The Pilgrim’s Tale, The Cobbler of Canterbury, Greene’s Vision  462; The Afterlife of Individual Tales  464 General Bibliography  473 Index 477

ABBREVIATIONS

ChR EETS ELH ELN ELR ES JEGP MÆ M&H MLN MLQ MP MS NLH NM N&Q PMLA RES SAC SP UTQ

Chaucer Review Early English Text Society English Literary History English Language Notes English Literary Renaissance English Studies Journal of English and Germanic Philology Medium Ævum Medievalia et humanistica Modern Language Notes Modern Language Quarterly Modern Philology Medieval Studies New Literary History Neuphilologische Mitteilungen Notes and Queries Publications of the Modern Languages Association Review of English Studies Studies in the Age of Chaucer Studies in Philology University of Toronto Quarterly

Introduction

The object of the third edition of this book, like its original, is to give an up-­to-­ date summary of what is known about the Canterbury Tales, together with a critical reading of each tale. To help with locating areas of discussion, the whole work and each of the tales are discussed under the same series of headings; many of these would have been familiar to Chaucer and his readers, but they are broad enough to encompass more recent critical and theoretical frameworks. The form such issues took throughout the Middle Ages is summarized by the pupil who asks for literary instruction in Conrad of Hirsau’s twelfth-­century Dialogue on the Authors: I want you (O teacher) to explain briefly and in summary form what we must look for, namely, who the author is, what he has written, the scale of his work, when he has written it, and how, that is whether it is in prose or verse, with what subject-­matter or intention each has begun his work, what end the composition has in view. I also want to find out about what is the difference between a poet, a writer of history, and a writer of discourse, between explanation and exposition and detailed study and transference of meaning, and to find out the nature of prose, verse, fable, the figures which are called tropes, and any other question that must be asked concerning ecclesiastical or pagan authors. A brief answer to all these questions seems to me to constitute a way in to the understanding of authors important and unimportant alike.

All of those questions remain basic to an understanding of the Canterbury Tales, and this book aims to provide at least some answers. The responses invited are however often uniquely complicated in the Tales, as Chaucer so rarely writes in a voice that can be identified simply as his own. However much he keeps control of every line of the tales, they are told in voices that are explicitly not directly his; and even the interjections of Chaucer as pilgrim are rarely those that as their creator he would wholeheartedly endorse. Identifying his ‘intention’ is therefore problematic; but substituting the ‘intention’ of the pilgrim who tells the tale can be still more misleading, especially for readers now who take for granted the

Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. Helen Cooper, Oxford University Press. © Helen Cooper 1989, 1996, 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198821427.003.0001

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grounding of every speech in the psychology of the speaker. There are occasions when Chaucer offers something analogous to that, so that the intentions of (for instance) the Wife of Bath in her prologue (to argue against men’s views of women—­against antifeminism, though that is not a word she could have used), the Summoner (to insult the Friar), or the Pardoner (to make money), are clear enough, whether or not they are adequate to the tale that follows (and often they are not); but those intentions are never psychological in the modern sense of their being unique to the individual and their life experiences. More often, the ‘intention’ of a tale is coupled to its genre rather than to individual psychology, though the genre may well be chosen for its appropriateness to its speaker—­or perhaps more accurately, the speakers may well be chosen for their appropriateness to the tales Chaucer wants to tell. The term he uses for the low-­class comic tales known to us as fabliaux was ‘cherles tales’, and that principle—­a mixture of social, cultural and moral placing—­is the first determinant of their tellers. This appropriateness of teller to genre (or sometimes in the Tales, its notable and deliberate inappropriateness) emerges in the more formal of Conrad’s questions, as part of the large field of study defined as rhetoric, what writing could do and how one might do it. One of Conrad’s questions that has necessarily concerned everyone involved in the transmission of Chaucer’s text, from the earliest scribes to the creators of online textual platforms, is what the author wrote. It took several centuries for something resembling a consensus to be reached that some tales and linking prologues present in some manuscripts were not by Chaucer at all, or what the order for the tales should be in a work that never completes its promised shape; and although most of those issues have now attained widely accepted answers, many questions remain over the readings of individual lines upwards. In addition to those matters of Conrad’s that will have concerned Chaucer’s original audiences and readers, whether consciously (for the more educated) or not (since the choice of English for the Tales makes them potentially ac­cess­ible to every speaker of English, though what we know of their early readers indicates a predominance of gentry, townsmen, and clerics), there are other issues that have moved more recently to the foreground of the understanding of literary studies, Chaucer included. Feminist theory has highlighted an area of interest that was already present in medieval culture, as witnessed by innumerable texts but which has only recently begun to receive its proper share of attention, even though an accusation against Chaucer of being too much ‘wommanes friend’ was made within about a century of his death (by Gavin Douglas, the Scottish translator of Virgil, to explain his misrepresentation of the Aeneid). Historical approaches to the Tales in the sense of identifying specific incidents or individuals have been familiar for well over a century, but the work’s grounding in broader social issues such as play a key role in New Historicism has increasingly shown a different kind of

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importance. Finding a balance between the social and political background and the work itself is not however a straightforward business. It is common now for the history to take priority, with the tales as a series of footnotes or illustrations to larger political or social movements; but those movements are best handled in studies that focus less closely on the tales themselves, and there is no point in reproducing in detail here work done finely elsewhere. This volume by contrast puts the work itself and the extraordinary skill and power of its writing at the centre, with the historical context as supporting material. That is what made Chaucer so central in the history of English poetry in the six and more centuries since his death. Furthermore, his continuing relevance to the social and ethical conditions of the twenty-­first century is now moving to the centre of critical debate, whether or not those conditions could have been familiar to Chaucer or his pilgrims. Those debates too are given a place here, though they are set within the cultural and intellectual parameters familiar to him and his earlier readers. The basic structure of the third edition of this volume is accordingly the same as in the previous editions, but with some changes of emphasis or additional material. After a revised introduction to the whole work, changes are concentrated on those immediately relevant for a reading of each tale. Since so much of the more recent criticism on the Tales has been of the broader theoretical or political kind that looks beyond the particularity of the tales, in many cases the most extensive alterations and updatings appear in the tale bibliographies rather than in the original text. The structure for the discussion of the work as a whole, and of each tale, is as follows. Date. I give arguments for the approximate dating of each tale in the course of Chaucer’s career or the composition of the Tales where these are available, and record hypothesis where it seems plausible. Text. There are some eighty surviving manuscripts of part or all of the Tales, and no two of them say quite the same thing. As it is all too easy to base an argument on a disputed reading or a passage of doubtful authenticity, or on structural patterns adopted by editors on flimsy manuscript evidence, I try to note those variants that are not always visible in modern edited texts but that could significantly affect interpretation as well as the sense or the style. I also indicate the kind of glosses that accompany each tale, and if these are ever likely to be Chaucer’s. Genre. The Canterbury Tales is unique among story-­collections for its generic variety—­a variety often insisted on in the links between the tales, which provide some of the earliest such commentary in Middle English. Medieval Latin treatises on poetry devoted plenty of space to generic definitions, but in relation to classical rather than vernacular kinds; and the generic accounts written of French, Provençal, or Welsh poetry have no Middle English equivalents. Such

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distinctions seem to have been taken for granted in England without any requirement for formal definition, on the basis of content alone. Some of Chaucer’s most interesting individual tales do however mix genres within themselves, a process that itself shows an acute sense of generic difference. A sense of genre, to judge from the many comments made on the subject within the work, was thus crucial to Chaucer’s conception of the Tales, and he is indeed exceptional among Middle English writers for his interest in, and alertness to, the differences of literary kinds available to him. Generic difference in the premodern period was closely tied to ideas of rhetorical appropriateness, decorum—­a word applied to the variety of the Tales from the sixteenth century forwards. I try to give some indication of its function and effect, not least in relation to the social embrace—­the polity—­of the pilgrim company. Sources and analogues. Chaucer draws his stories from a remarkably wide range of origins, from French, Latin, and Italian as well as English, and from all the cultural varieties that those languages encompass. Where specific sources are known for the individual tales, I give summaries and an account of Chaucer’s use and adaptation of them. I also discuss the sources of illustrative material, major authoritative aphorisms, and so on. Where no sources are known, I try to reconstruct the literary context in which he was working. The most extensive change since the original edition of this volume relates to the sources for the whole conception of the Tales. Structure. Narratology has tended to be an under-­studied area of the Tales, though the stories are often intriguingly structured, both in the arrangement of their narrative material and in their tendency to play games with fictive forms. I discuss the ground plan of each tale, how structure can affect meaning, their reliance on narrative, speech, or commentary, and the interest in the process of storytelling that Chaucer shows. Themes—­thematics and ‘sentence’. Chaucer does not write full-­scale allegory; it is however very difficult to write a story that does not carry some meaning beyond the bare events recounted, and which shapes how those events are told. The term ‘themes’ has tended to become degraded since the original writing of this book; but that literature should have a ‘sentence’, a set of meanings informing its shape and content, was a recognized principle of composition in the Middle Ages—­hence the emphasis on it by Conrad of Hirsau’s student quoted at the start of this introduction. These meanings are often overt, expressed in digressions, comments from the narrator or the pilgrims, or concluding moralites, but those are not always supplied; and even when they appear to be, disagreement is often still an option, sometimes an implied requirement. Chaucer is generously open to all kinds of experience, but he maintains a clear ethical core, even if his historically conditioned ethics are on occasion at odds with our own (one might cite the anti-­Semitism of the Prioress’s Tale as being the most egregious example, were it not that it is still so widely current). In this

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section, I look at the relation of such matters to the narratives that contain them: at the inner meanings that shape the tales, whether they are made explicit or not. The ways in which tale and teller can affect each other are also discussed here. The tale in context. The tales of the Canterbury sequence could stand as au­tono­mous short stories or narrative poems, but they do not: they are placed within a larger work, and each tale affects the others and is affected by them. This section studies the additional meanings and resonances that result from their being part of the larger scheme. Style. The style—­or styles—­of each tale can be as distinctive as its genre or its themes, and they are indeed an integral part of such things, reinforcing the social elevation or moral identity of both tale and, often, its teller. Chaucer has an especially interesting range of styles at his disposal, not only because of the range of his sources, but because the composite nature of English, deriving from its dual origins in Germanic Old English and Latin-­derived French, was just reaching its full range of potential contrasting registers in his own lifetime; and this gave him a richness of choice of vocabulary and style unparalleled in any other language, and never so fully exploited elsewhere until Shakespeare. I analyse aspects such as the choice of words and images, the verse forms, rhetorical heightening, and characteristic syntax of each tale. In addition, I provide separate discussions of the linking passages or prologues. One characteristic of the links is the quantity of critical or theoretical comment they contain, and I have tried to bring out this emphasis. Such a division into separate areas of discussion is a matter of convenience, and the most frustrated or sceptical reader will still not be as conscious as I am of the artificiality of some of these boundaries. How Chaucer treats a source is inseparable from what he wants to say; we seldom read the tales as isolated units, without being aware of the Reeve’s breathing fire at the Miller, or the Merchant’s glancing over his shoulder at the Wife of Bath. I have tried to arrange the ma­ter­ ial so that it is possible to find the discussion of a specific point where it would most reasonably be expected, but the sections, like the tales, are not watertight units, and there are plenty of spills and leaks. I have not attempted to give a complete survey of critical viewpoints on the tales, though the annotated bibliographies at the end of each section record some of the lines of battle. My own approach emphasizes primarily Chaucer’s literary and stylistic awareness, his sheer multifariousness, rather than readings that see the tales as dramatic speeches by their tellers, as allegories of orthodox Christian teaching, or as footnotes to political events, though I have learnt much from such interpretations. But there are as many interpretations of Chaucer as there are readers; he is supremely skilled at providing material for an almost infinite variety of readings (though he would be startled at some of the in­ter­pret­ations he has produced). It is impossible, therefore, to write a definitive study of the Tales, and I am very much aware of that impossibility.

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The scholarship on the work is vast; I have had to make a large number of omissions in the course of selecting material, and there will inevitably be other accidental ones. But more importantly, Chaucer is not the kind of author on whom it is possible to be definitive. The Tales itself is unfinished; its possibilities are endless. I have tried to keep the sense of the work’s open-­endedness, even where it has led me down some unexpected paths. I do not expect that every reader will follow me along all of them, though some (such as the claim of protofeminism in the Clerk’s Tale) have in the event become well trodden since the first edition of this book. The interpretations given in the main text are my own, though the running bibliographies, discussed below, note significant inspirations and precursors as well as interesting disagreements. Chaucer is not the kind of writer on whom there can ever be a last word, as the continuing abundance of criticism testifies. The opening quotation is abbreviated from Conrad of Hirsau, Dialogue on the Authors, extracts ed. A.  J.  Minnis and A.  B.  Scott, with the assistance of David Wallace, in Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c. 1375 (Oxford, 1988, 1991), pp. 40–1.

BIBLIOGRA P HICAL NOTE

All citations from Chaucer in this book are taken from The Riverside Chaucer, edited by Larry D. Benson, and keyed to its numbering. This established itself as the definitive edition when it was first published in 1987; other editions published since then have generally adopted its numbering system or at least in­corp­or­ated it alongside their own, so readers using other more recent editions should still not have too much problem in locating citations. In my original writing, I also kept alongside me the eight volumes of Manly and Rickert, with their comprehensive lists of textual variants; Skeat’s magnificent edition; and a number of volumes of the never-­completed Variorum Chaucer. Of more recent single-­volume editions, I have most consistently consulted that of Jill Mann, supplemented by that of David Lawton. As no edition of a work such as the Canterbury Tales can replace the manuscripts, I have also relied heavily on facsimiles, especially those of Hengwrt and Ellesmere; and I have frequently consulted those and other manuscripts available online, and occasionally the manuscripts themselves. Full details of the printed editions I have used, including the old Chaucer Society prints, are given below. An increasing number are available in digital form. I have profited from reading many excellent critical works on the Tales as a whole, and some of the most important for the development of criticism of the work are outlined in the following chapter. These are given a full reference at their first mention and are listed in the General Bibliography at the end of this

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volume; I give abbreviated references to them in the bibliographies to individual tales when I owe them a specific debt, or where their discussion is of particular importance. An outline of Chaucer’s recurrent sources is also given there, as a locus for basic information about them. Each section of the discussion of the individual tales is also followed by its own brief annotated bibliography. This stands in for footnotes to specific items used in compiling the section; suggests further reading; gives some indication of older lines of interpretation that have fashioned modern views of the tale in question; and indicates intersections with current preoccupations. Articles relevant to just a small number of tales are given a full reference in the section bibliographies at first mention, and either a cross-­reference or an abbreviated reference sufficient to identify the source on later mentions. As the URLs for online publications are rarely stable, I suggest search terms where these are not obvious.

Textual Bibliography All quotations from Chaucer in this book are taken, unless otherwise specified, from The Riverside Chaucer, general editor Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987; Oxford, 1988; 3rd edn. intro. Christopher Cannon, Oxford, 2008), and I have profited greatly from the scholarship of its many contributors. This edition is itself based on the second edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston and Oxford, 1957). Retaining the Riverside numbering in this book eases access to almost all criticism before 2020. The number of online editions and manuscript facsimiles is constantly increasing, so readers are advised to check for the latest updates. There are in addition a number of printed editions under way, notably of Chaucer’s complete works, that had not appeared in time to be taken into account for this volume, including those by Julia Boffey and A.  S.  G.  Edwards (Cambridge), and by Christopher Cannon and James Simpson (Oxford).

The following is an alphabetical selection of other editions of the Tales: Boenig, Robert, and Andrew Taylor (eds.), Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Peterborough, Ontario, 2008). A student edition with thorough glossing and an appendix of ‘background documents’. Kolve, V. A., and Glending Olson (eds.), The Canterbury Tales: Seventeen Tales and the General Prologue (New York, 2018), is the third in a sequence of Norton editions containing an increasing number of tales, all with selected source and background texts; the first edition, with nine tales, appeared in 1989. Lawton, David (ed.), The Norton Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (New York, 2020), with associated ebook and audio recording, is excerpted from his complete Norton Chaucer (2019), which itself replaces E. T. Donaldson’s Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader (New York, 1958) (which excluded the prose works). Manly, John  M., and Edith Rickert (eds.), The Text of the Canterbury Tales (8 vols., Chicago, 1940). This describes the manuscripts and records all textual variants.

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Mann, Jill (ed.), Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (London, 2005). Excellent edition that combines scholarship and readability, with particularly generous annotations and commentary. Skeat, W. W. (ed.), The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (7 vols., Oxford, 1894–1900). Although his scholarship is often outdated, Skeat is still a lucid and valuable source of essential information. A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (Norman, Okla., 1979–2002) is a multi-­volume edition, never completed, under the general editorship of Paul G. Ruggiers. Volumes on individual tales are listed in the appropriate tale bibliographies.

Selected Manuscript Facsimiles and Transcripts Ellesmere: The New Ellesmere Chaucer Facsimile and its accompanying volume of essays, The Ellesmere Chaucer: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Martin Stevens and Daniel Woodward (San Marino, Calif., and Tokyo, 1995). Also useful is The Ellesmere Manuscript Reproduced in Facsimile (2 vols., Manchester, 1911), reprinted as The Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: A Working Facsimile, with introduction by Ralph Hanna III (Cambridge, 1989). Also online at the Huntington Library website. Gg.4.27: The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Facsimile of Cambridge University Library MS Gg.4.27, with introductions by M. B. Parkes and Richard Beadle (3 vols., Cambridge, 1979–80). Also online at the Cambridge University Library website. Hengwrt: The Canterbury Tales: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Hengwrt Manuscript, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Variorum I, Norman, Okla., 1979). Also online at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; and with comparison with Ellesmere and other information on CD-­ROM ed. Estelle Stubbs, The Hengwrt Chaucer Research Edition (Scholarly Digital Editions, 2002). Chaucer Society transcripts edited by Frederick J. Furnivall, now available in a variety of reprints and now also all digitized online: [Cambridge University Library] Cambridge MS Dd.4.24 (1901–2). [Corpus Christi College, Oxford] Corpus MS [198] (1868–77). [British Library] Harleian MS 7334 (1885). [British Library] Lansdowne MS [851] (1868–77). [Petworth House, Sussex] Petworth MS (1868–77).

The Canterbury Tales

DATE

The writing of the Canterbury Tales occupied the last dozen or so years of Chaucer’s life. He probably started work on it in the later 1380s; the latest of the few references it contains to specific events are to the final decade of the century. He died in 1400, and it is not known whether he continued working on it until his death. Within this period, all dates are conjectural, and are discussed sep­ar­ ate­ly for each tale in the course of the book. Two of the tales, the Knight’s and Second Nun’s, were written at some earlier date, and from time to time early composition has been suggested for a number of the others. Many were prob­ ably written before a specific place in the sequence was assigned to them, or a specific teller; the General Prologue need not have been written first, nor need the articulating device of the pilgrimage have given Chaucer the idea of writing a story-­collection. The year 1387 was for long taken as the date of the pilgrimage. This particular pilgrimage, however, is fictional, and Chaucer himself does not date it; the open­ ing of the work could locate it in any sweet April of the later fourteenth century, or of the Middle Ages. The work’s placing between contemporaneity and time­ lessness is peculiarly ambivalent. The spring opening is followed by a number of references to such specific matters as the nefarious financial activities of the par­ doners who claimed association with the hospital of St Mary Rouncesval, the location of the wool staple, and, in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the ‘Peasants’ Revolt’, the English Rising of 1381. Other more coded references to political events have been increasingly suggested for the work in tandem with the rise of historicism. Lollardy, England’s first home-­grown heresy, in which Wyclif and his followers mounted a challenge to both ecclesiastical institutions and beliefs, gets one pass­ ing reference, though it leaves its traces in the text in more covert ways, not least in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. Strong arguments are being made to link the work with its context in the contemporary politics of both London and Europe. Yet one would never guess from a reading of the Tales alone just how troubled were the years in which it was composed: years of social and political unrest that led to the execution of several of Chaucer’s close associates and culminated in Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. Helen Cooper, Oxford University Press. © Helen Cooper 1989, 1996, 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198821427.003.0002

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the deposition of Richard II. Chaucer himself moved out of range of the worst troubles, to Kent; and that too may be reflected in the shift of focus of the Tales, from the courtly narratives and concerns of the dream visions and Troilus to the pilgrimage route to Canterbury and its motley travellers. Yet the Tales does belong to the late fourteenth century, and detail after detail registers the broader context of its historical moment. One is reflected in Chaucer’s own move, away from the court whose traditional French culture is so evident in his earlier poems to the more aggressive, mercantile, and pre­dom­in­ ant­ly male culture of the city. Many smaller details seem trivial, though their later cultural effects were enormous: the work contains almost the first English references to the recent inventions of paper, the prerequisite for both bureau­ cracy and mass literacy; and of the mechanical clock, which was to alter the conception of time from being a subset of eternity or an element of Creation, such as were signified by the canonical hours or the movement of the sun, to being a mechanized commodity under human ownership. The work marks the moment when it was still possible to believe in the principle of a stable and uni­ fied Church, however imperfect in practice—­this was the era of the Great Schism with its two rival popes—­even while it documents the gap between personal piety and institutional corruption. It is poised on the divide between a world conceived in terms of a stable and God-­given feudal hierarchy, and a society disrupted and energized by the pressures of social mobility at every level from the peasantry to the crown, by the demographic collapse following on the Black Death, and by the continuing rise in the importance of money and professional function rather than land or rank in the social machinery. The divide is repre­ sented in the reluctance of both the ‘cherles’ and the moneyed bourgeoisie of the Tales to accept any humble place assigned to them, in the satire on the corrup­ tion rife within the Church, in the ability to ask questions of a kind disallowed by official doctrine as to the nature of the providential ordering of the world, in the stress on the qualities of the good ruler. The work is more concerned with ethics, both personal and political, than with political events; but the ethical questions it considers are both the timeless ones of fallible human beings living in an unstable world, and those raised by the frightening breakdown of hier­ archy and stability in late fourteenth-­century England. W. W. Skeat (ed., Works of Chaucer, iii. 373) calculated the 1387 date out of the need to find a year when a pilgrimage that started on 17 April (see Tales II. 5) would not include a Sunday; but the whole argument rests on an anachronistic notion of realism. Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton, N.J., 2019), is the most detailed account of Chaucer’s life in his political context both in London and abroad. David Wallace studies the political implications of Chaucer’s Italian connections in his Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, Calif., 1997). His Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction (Oxford, 2017) is an admirable short introduction to the essentials of his context and his poetry.

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Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1992), gives an account of the events of Chaucer’s own life, and, in contrast to the work of Turner and Wallace, urges his avoidance of political involvement. He also discusses the sig­ nificance of Chaucer’s move away from the court in his ‘The Canterbury Tales and London club Culture’, in Chaucer and the City, ed. Ardis Butterfield (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 95–108. Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), analyses Chaucer’s social and political affiliations, and the Tales as a model of contemporary social diversity. Other kinds of contextualization are provided by Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York, 1978), on connections with Western Europe; by Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), on the popular piety of the later Middle Ages; and in Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Minneapolis, Minn., 1992). There has been a proliferation in recent years of multi-­author companions that give an overview of fourteenth-­century contextual aspects of Chaucer’s life and works, in par­ ticular his political, social, literary, and intellectual backgrounds; chapters from these are cited below in the individual tale biographies. One that gives more attention than many to the integration of all these backgrounds into the Canterbury Tales and his other poetry, along with information on such matters as his language and poetics, manuscript copying, and his later reception, is Geoffrey Chaucer in Context, ed. Ian Johnson (Cambridge, 2019).

TEXT

There are fifty-­five surviving manuscripts that appear once to have contained the complete Tales, though some of them are now damaged. A further twenty-­ eight contain one or more individual tales, or survive in such fragmentary form that it is impossible to tell whether the remaining leaves once belonged to a manuscript of the whole work or to a copy of a single tale. In contrast to our own tendency to anthologize the tales we regard as the liveliest or with the greatest human interest, medieval scribes who selected individual stories preferred to select those of more moral or religious import or the tales of pathos. The texts vary in multitudinous small details and some major ones, and attempts to reconstruct Chaucer’s original, or the copy of his work that served as archetype for the earliest manuscripts, have met with only partial success. Some variants are due to miscopying, but the nature of others suggests that Chaucer himself was still in the process of making alterations, additions, and excisions to his work. A few manuscripts contain marginal glosses, some shared, some unique to the particular manuscript; it is still subject to speculation as to whether Chaucer himself was responsible for any of these. Furthermore, it is not known whether he had a final arrangement in mind for the order of the tales, and so whether any of the extant manuscripts preserve an order that has any authorial

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justification. This is not something that would have troubled his early readers unduly, though there were a number of attempts to supply links between tales where the manuscripts did not. There are accordingly some recent editorial moves towards presenting the text as a single continuous unit, to give more of a sense of the textual continuity most readers would have encountered before modern editorial intervention became normal practice. There is however more consistency of order among the manuscripts than this might suggest; and the recognition that the tales clump together in comparatively stable groupings is a genuine aid to critical understanding. They show where Chaucer makes connections, and, almost as importantly, where he does not; and they help to limit the kind of free-­for-­all criticism implied by suggesting rearrange­ ments for the tales beyond any manuscript justification. All the complete manu­ scripts start with the General Prologue and end with the Parson, and most of the tales move around in constant ‘groups’ (originally designated by the alphabetical ‘Chaucer Society’ arrangement offered in Skeat’s great edition, but rarely employed now), or alternatively ‘fragments’ (ordered by number, as given in the Riverside Chaucer and retained in some more recent editions). These appear in the manu­ scripts in two widespread orders, differentiated only by the different places assigned to Fragment VIII (the Skeat/Chaucer Society’s G). Since the ‘Fragment’ terminology and ordering have become effectively canonical in recent years and are used in almost all the criticism of the past few decades, I have retained it in this volume. It is shown here with the Chaucer Society scheme alongside: Fragment I (A) Fragment II (B1) Fragment III (D) Fragment IV (E) Fragment V (F) Fragment VI (C) Fragment VII (B2) Fragment VIII (G) Fragment IX (H) Fragment X (I)

General Prologue, Knight, Miller, Reeve, Cook Man of Law Wife, Friar, Summoner Clerk, Merchant Squire, Franklin Physician, Pardoner Shipman, Prioress, Sir Thopas, Melibee, Monk, Nun’s Priest Second Nun, Canon’s Yeoman Manciple Parson

In the alternative manuscript ordering, Fragment VIII appears before VI, to give an order Franklin–­Second Nun–­Canon’s Yeoman–­Physician–­Pardoner–­Shipman. Fragments I and II appear together as a unit in almost all manuscripts; Fragments VI and VII consistently follow that order, as do IX and X. By contrast, Fragments IV and V (Clerk–­Merchant–­Squire–­Franklin) are frequently broken up, and the four tales are often separated, but there are compelling r­ easons for believing that they too should form a single sequence. The positions of these four tales and of

The Canterbury Tales13

the wandering fragments are discussed in more detail in the course of this book. The old Chaucer Society designation ‘B2’ for Fragment VII, and moving it to follow the Man of Law’s Tale, has no manuscript justification. What may well be the two earliest surviving manuscripts, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 392 D, known as ‘Hengwrt’, and Ellesmere 26.C.9 in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, otherwise ‘Ellesmere’, are generally agreed to have been written by the same scribe. An identification for him has been suggested with the scrivener Adam Pynkhurst (and so arguably the man to whom Chaucer’s brief poem ‘Chaucer’s Words unto Adam’ were addressed), though the identification has been challenged. Hengwrt was copied at about the time of Chaucer’s death, and it appears to contain the best text—­the nearest, that is, to what Chaucer wrote. The scribe, however, whoever he was, seems to have received his copy in bits and pieces; his attempts to order it are very much an ad hoc affair, and they have been rendered still worse by the later misbinding of the manuscript. The order in which the tales appear is therefore disjointed to an unusual degree. Some of the copy for the Tales appears never to have reached his hands at all: most notably, the Merchant’s Prologue and the entire episode of the Canon’s Yeoman are both lacking. Even here, however, most of the constant groups appear—­Fragment I, III, VI–­VII, IX–­X.  Ellesmere, by contrast, is the most beautiful of the extant manuscripts: it is so finished and elegant a work that later editors were naturally inclined to use it as a base text, although some of its readings are inferior to those of the battered Hengwrt. It is the earliest manu­ script to contain the tales in the order listed above, which may not be the one Chaucer would finally have had in mind had he completed the work, but which does make the best sense of what we have. I have tried not to complicate this book by too many manuscript sigla: ­scholars of Chaucer’s text will in any case require far more detail than I can give here. I therefore refer to only a few manuscripts apart from Hengwrt and Ellesmere: two from the Cambridge University Library, Dd.4.24, whose scribe had some intriguingly eccentric moments, and Gg.4.27, the earliest ‘complete works’ of Chaucer; and one from Corpus Christi College Oxford, MS 198, cited as Corpus. All belong to the early years of the fifteenth century. A bibliography of editions and facsimiles of the Tales that I have used is given on pp. 7–8 above, which should be supplemented by the increasing number of manuscripts that are available online. Of printed editions, Manly and Rickert’s The Text of the Canterbury Tales remains the indispensable work of reference on text­ual variants, although its conclusions are increasingly called into question (see in particular George Kane’s critique in Paul  G.  Ruggiers (ed.), Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition (Norman, Okla., 1984), ch. 11). Ralph Hanna III summarizes the present state of scholarship in his textual notes to the Riverside Chaucer. The ‘Paleographical Introduction’ by A. I. Doyle and M. B. Parkes to Ruggiers’s facsimile of Hengwrt is essential reading on the problems of establishing the text of the Tales.

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A full list of all the manuscripts of the Tales, including incomplete ones, with their locations and dates, is given as Appendix A in Derek Pearsall’s Geoffrey Chaucer (London, 1985), pp. 321– 5 (though note that Takamiya MS 8, listed there as in Tokyo, is now at Yale). Charles A. Owen, Jr., gives a useful survey of manuscript relations in The Manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, 1991). His work is one of many that do not support N.  F.  Blake’s argument (in The Textual Tradition of the Canterbury Tales (London, 1985)) that Hengwrt is the sole authority for Chaucer’s text. On the ordering of the tales, and for arguments that the order outlined here is the most fully concordant with the internal and external evidence provided by the state of the surviving texts, see Larry  D.  Benson, ‘The Order of the Canterbury Tales’, SAC 3 (1981), 77–120, and Helen Cooper, ‘The Order of the Tales in the Ellesmere Manuscript’ in Stevens and Woodward, eds., The Ellesmere Chaucer, pp. 245–61. Pearsall discusses the whole issue in his Geoffrey Chaucer, pp. 14–22, concluding with his famous sug­ gestion that the Tales should be issued with the all the fragments except the first and last in a set of folders for the reader to rearrange. For a sample criticism of the idea of the fragments, see Robert Mayer-­Lee, ‘Abandon the Fragments’, SAC 35 (2013), 46–83. A collection of spurious links and tales found in various manuscripts is edited by John M. Bowers, The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-­Century Continuations and Additions (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1992; available online, search ). On the identity of the scribe of Hengwrt and Ellesmere, see Linne  R.  Mooney, ‘Chaucer’s Scribe’, Speculum 81 (2006), 97–138, and for the most comprehensive challenge, Lawrence Warner, Chaucer’s Scribes: London Textual Production, 1384–1432 (Cambridge, 2018).

GENRE

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories—­and if that seems too loose a term to serve as a generic category, the number of other story-­collections known in the fourteenth century, and the forms they took, suggest that it was suffi­ ciently familiar as a literary kind to raise certain audience expectations in the same way as any other genre. It is therefore an instructive definition, for Chaucer’s work is extensively and precisely different from the other collections in ways that alert his readers to his originality. The differences lie in three principal areas: the kind of frame narrative he uses, with multiple tellers of different outlook and social class; connected with that, the variety of the stories told; and the lack of any clear moral framework. The simplest story-­collections were ragbags of exempla for use by preachers, relentlessly moral, with little or no inherent ordering principle (though they sometimes arranged their stories alphabetically by moral point made), and no variation of genre or voice. Others assembled stories of a particular genre, such as saints’ lives, or beast-­fables; Chaucer’s own Legend of Good Women and Monk’s Tale are of this sort, and demonstrate clearly the limitations of such a kind. Even the most highly developed frame narratives of the Middle Ages, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron, show little of Chaucer’s rigorous generic and stylistic

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variation; and in the Decameron itself, each day’s tales are confined (at least in theory) to a single theme. The primary expectations of story-­collections were that they would be moral, and that they would be reasonably homogeneous. Chaucer provides no moral pattern or framework, and the individual tales are often strongly resistant to providing one. He also exploits a generic and poetic range for the individual tales that is unparalleled in any other collection. The Tales comes close to offering a distinctio, a normative array, of all the literary forms current in the late Middle Ages. Such variety makes unprecedentedly high demands for any method of articu­ lating the stories. Chaucer’s answer takes two forms, both again without parallel: the pilgrims, and the competition. The frame story of the pilgrimage allows him to assemble a mixture of people to match the variety of the tales: a mixture that embraces both their social range and their differing individual priorities (money, God, love, sex, and so on), and in which the cross-­cutting of the two brings a constant variation of cultural comment and nuancing of style. The setting of the competition encourages the reader to compare the tales, and so invites a reading inflected by that favourite medieval genre, the debate: of different ideas, or of readings of the world as embodied in the various genres, put into the same frame for judgement. That process of comparison or of contrast further invites recog­ nition of subtler details of association or difference; and it insists too on the importance of aesthetic pleasure and sheer enjoyment as well as exemplary or didactic values—‘tales of best sentence and moost solaas’ (I. 798). The competi­ tion element and the variety of the tales go together, sometimes encouraged by explicit or implicit arguments among the pilgrims. Finally, however, so far as the poetics are concerned, there need be no single winner among the tales, for Chaucer can prove his poetic mastery by writing the best romance, the best beast-­fable, the best saint’s life. On story-­collections, see Piero Boitani, English Medieval Narrative in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, trans. Joan Krakover Hall (Cambridge, 1982), ch. 5, and Helen Cooper, The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (London and Athens, Ga., 1983), ch. 1. On the Tales as distinctio, see Judson Boyce Allen and Theresa Anne Moritz, A Distinction of Stories: The Medieval Unity of Chaucer’s Fair Chain of Narratives for Canterbury (Columbus, Ohio, 1981).

SOURCES AND ANALOGUES

That Chaucer’s scheme for the Tales is unprecedented qualifies what one can hope to find in the way of sources and analogues for the work as a whole. That he did so often rework existing material—­as all writers have done from Homer to Milton to the present day—­can encourage too much of a belief that he never made anything up, or always worked from written texts. The context for the

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work, however, lies not only in written works of literature, but in cultural prac­ tices. There is no known model for setting a story-­collection within a pilgrim­ age, but a number of writers make mention of pilgrims telling stories on the road; it was Chaucer who saw the potential in the idea. The idea of literary competitions was well established in the Middle Ages, though it was unusual to make narratives rather than poetry the subject of rivalry. Entire poetic genres—­the tenso, the jeu-­parti, the flyting—­were devoted to poetry-­matches between paired contestants, though pre-­Chaucerian ex­amples are mostly in Provençal or French or Latin. Of more immediate relevance to the Tales is the London Puy, a fraternity of London merchants of the social group to which Chaucer’s maternal grandparents belonged, which set up as its chief secu­ lar function a competition for the best lyric and accompanying music. The fra­ ternity was modelled on the continental poetic guilds, the Arras puy being the most famous. The members of the English Puy, active at the end of the thir­ teenth and start of the fourteenth century, swore obedience to an annually selected prince, who also presided at the yearly feast of the company and judged the songs; the winner was given a crown, and also, interestingly in the light of the Tales, got his dinner free. As with all fraternities, religious observances were also a major activity. The pilgrims likewise form themselves into a company who swear obedience to a master of ceremonies who doubles as judge and who promises a free supper to the winner, and they too combine literary contest