Geoffrey Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales – Vol. III
The Host - Philip Madoc
The Friar’s Tale - Tim Pigott-Smith
The Summoner’s Tale - Stephen Tompkinson
The Lawyer’s Tale - Charles Kay
The Seaman’s Tale - Timothy West
The Prioress’s Tale - Rosalind Shanks
The Manciple’s Tale - Sean Barrett
The Physician’s Tale - Michael Maloney
The Canterbury Tales, written near the
end of Chaucer’s life and hence towards
the close of the fourteenth century, is
perhaps the greatest English literary work
of the Middle Ages: yet it speaks to us
today with almost undimmed clarity and
relevance.
Chaucer imagines a group of twentynine
pilgrims who meet in the Tabard Inn in
Southwark, intent on making the traditional
journey to the martyr’s shrine of St Thomas
a Becket in Canterbury. Harry Bailly, landlord
of the Tabard, proposes that the company
should entertain themselves on the road
with a storytelling competition. The teller of
the best tale will be rewarded with a supper
at the others’ expense when the travellers
return to London. Chaucer never completed
this elaborate scheme – each pilgrim was
supposed to tell four tales, but in fact we
only have twenty-four altogether – yet, with
the pieces of linking narrative and the
prologues to each tale, the work as a whole
constitutes a marvellously varied evocation
of the medieval world which also goes
beyond its period to penetrate (humorously,
gravely, tolerantly) human nature itself.
Chaucer, as a member of this company of pilgrims, presents himself with mock
innocence as the admiring observer of his
fellows, depicted in the General Prologue.
Many of these are clearly rogues – the
coarse, cheating Miller, the repulsive yet
compelling Pardoner – yet in each of them
Chaucer finds something human, often a
sheer vitality or love of life which is
irresistible: the Monk may prefer hunting to
prayer, but he is after all a manly man, to
be an abbot able. Perhaps only the
unassuming, devoted Parson and his
humbly labouring brother the Ploughman
rise entirely above Chaucer’s teasing irony;
certainly the Parson’s fellow clergy and
religious officers belong to a Church
riddled with gross corruption. Everyone, it
seems, is on the make, in a world still
recovering from the ravages of the Black
Death.
The seventh tale (in Chaucer’s original
order) is told by the Friar, a member of a
mendicant order who uses his privileged
position to exploit the young people of his
district. Many of the tales in Chaucer’s
collection are told in order to score points
off other pilgrims: the Friar uses his to
make fun of the Summoner. In the story, a summoner makes a pact with the devil to
share any ill-gotten gains they may make,
but does not reckon on the perverse
sincerity of the devil who will only take that
which is ‘ex corde’ – from the heart – and
is thus able to bear the summoner to hell
and damnation when an old woman, with
genuine feeling, wishes the duplicitous
summoner to ‘go to the devil’.
Not surprisingly, the Summoner’s Tale
takes the form of a riposte. Summoners
were officers of the Church responsible for
summoning miscreants under canon law to
the Church courts: Chaucer’s Summoner is
an especially repulsive specimen, both
morally and physically. Friars were equally
known for their greed and corruption, so,
in his tale, the Summoner has his Friar
faced with the apparently impossible task
of sharing out a legacy. This legacy consists
of a fart ‘donated’ by a bedridden
householder exasperated by the friar’s
repeated requests for money. The tale
suggests a symbolism whereby the friar’s
hypocritical preaching is aptly represented
by the fart.
The Lawyer’s Tale is altogether more
high-minded, befitting the dignity of its
teller: Constance, a Christian princess,
marries a sultan on condition that he
converts to Christianity but then, victim of
the sultan’s mother’s plotting, is cast away on the seas. The story is an allegory of
Christian fortitude: years later, the wicked
mother-in-law long since executed, the
mother and son who have been
miraculously preserved in their wanderings
are reunited in Rome with the grieving
sultan. A similar tale is also found in the
‘Confessio Amantis’ of Gower, Chaucer’s
great contemporary, but both writers
borrowed from an earlier text (or texts).
The Seaman (Chaucer calls him a
‘shipman’ in the original) relates a story of
cynical amorality well suited to his own
ruthless character: we hear in the Prologue
of his thieving and violence. A rich,
workaholic merchant neglects his pretty
wife who seeks solace in the arms of a
family friend, a well-off monk given free
rein by his abbot to travel outside his
religious house. The husband pays his wife
a meagre allowance, both sexually and
financially; she therefore borrows from the
monk to pay for finery and grants him
sexual favours in return; she is not aware
that the monk has himself borrowed the
money from the merchant. If the story has
a moral, it can only be that he who thinks
solely of money lays himself open to
exploitation in other ways.
We know from the General Prologue
that the Prioress is a lady who cultivates
an air of selfless sensitivity but who nevertheless seems unduly interested in her
own appearance and the impression she
makes on others, men especially. Her tale is
a simple exercise in religious pathos: a little
boy from an Asian city is murdered by
members of the Jewish community as he
sings a hymn. His body is found because,
miraculously, he continues to sing even in
death. Modern listeners may well be
repelled by the unthinking anti-semitism,
but we have to remember how endemic
such attitudes were in the Middle Ages: the
story itself makes explicit reference to Hugh
of Lincoln, allegedly murdered by Jews in
1255.
The Manciple is a kind of domestic
bursar or caterer, extremely shrewd in his
business dealings yet almost entirely
uneducated. His story is based on the wellknown
tale of the tell-tale crow: versions of
it appear in Ovid, in the work of Guillaume
de Machaut, and in Gower’s ‘Confessio
Amantis’. Phoebus owns a talking crow
which tells him of his wife’s sexual
treachery; enraged, Phoebus kills his wife;
later, he turns upon the crow and plucks its
feathers, declaring that he and his issue
‘shall be black’, the devil’s colour. Again,
the moral is a cynical one: never tell any
man that his wife has been unfaithful.
The Physician’s Tale takes us back to a
world of principle and virtue – remote, as it happens, from the Physician himself who, it
is clear from the Prologue, is a charlatan.
The story, derived from Livy but owing
much to a later version in Jean de Meun’s
‘Romance of the Rose’, is stark and
shocking: a beautiful girl of impeccable
virtue is cast into the power of a corrupt
judge, Appius, but chooses to die at her
father’s hand rather than be shamed. The
Host’s reaction perhaps expresses the
reader’s: the gifts of beauty and virtue may
often, in this wicked world, be our
undoing.
***
Son of a vintner, Geoffrey Chaucer was
born in London in 1340 or thereabouts. He
enjoyed a successful and varied career as
courtier and diplomat, travelling extensively
in France and Italy, where he may have met
Boccaccio and Petrarch. In 1374 he was
made Controller of Customs in the Port of
London; in 1386 he represented Kent as
Knight of the Shire, and may have lived
there until his death in 1400. He is buried
in Westminster Abbey.
Chaucer derives almost all his tales from
known sources, classical, French or Italian,
but he is brilliantly successful in giving
them a tone and feeling which are very
English (concrete, ironic) and very much his
own. He wrote prolifically and in a number
of styles: other works include the great ‘Troilus and Criseyde’, ‘The Book of the
Duchess’ and ‘A Treatise on the Astrolabe’.
He also translated ‘The Romance of the
Rose’. His range of subject matter, width of
reading and sophistication are remarkable;
his most notable qualities are perhaps his
deeply sympathetic view of human
aspiration and weakness, and (when
required) his capacity for close, ironic
observation.
Notes by Perry Keenlyside
The music on this recording is taken from the NAXOS catalogue
Tugend und Untugend
German Secular Songs and instrumental music from the time of Luther
8.553352
Convivium Musicum / Ensemble Villanella / Sven Berger
Music programmed by Sarah Butcher
