The Shipman's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Shipman’s Tale has several features that strike a familiar note to anyone who has followed the Canterbury Tales in sequence to this point. This is another “fabliau”, meaning, in Chaucer’s hands, an amusing short story in which poetic justice is meted out, and it concerns a husband whose wife cuckolds him. This is therefore the territory already explored by the Miller, the Reeve and the Merchant.

However, there is another echo in this Tale, which is the theme of “what do women want?” that was explored by the Wife of Bath. Indeed, it is entirely possible that Chaucer originally intended to allow the Wife of Bath to tell this Tale, rather than the Shipman. 

The Tale

The Tale is set in France, in the town of Saint Denis (near Paris) where a rich merchant is married to a lively and beautiful young woman who has expensive tastes. The merchant’s house is visited by many people including, on a regular basis, a monk, aged about 30, who lives at a religious house in Paris. The monk, named John, claims to be related to the merchant. From the description given of the monk’s appearance and lifestyle, he sounds not unlike the Monk of the pilgrimage, namely someone for whom religious observance is far less important than fine living.

The merchant is about to go off on a trading mission to Bruges, but he invites the monk to pay them a visit before he does so. On the morning of the third day of the visit, the merchant shuts himself up in his counting-house to deal with his finances, while the monk walks in the garden where he meets the wife and her young daughter. The wife looks pale, and the monk jests that she must have had a busy night between the sheets, with little time for sleep.

However, this is not the case, and the wife tells him that she is not at all happy in her marriage. Swearing him to secrecy, she offers to tell him the whole story. As this is clearly going to be a time for confessions, the monk freely admits that he is not, after all, related to the merchant. She then tells him that the merchant is a very poor husband, as he fails her in the six things that a wife needs from her man, namely good health, wisdom, wealth, generosity, obedience to her (shades of the Wife of Bath!) and being good in bed. She also tells the monk that she needs money for her next Sunday dress and could he please lend her a hundred franks? He promises to do so, and gives her a very un-monklike kiss.

After an interlude in which the merchant reveals, to his wife, his care with money, pointing out that only those merchants who take such care are likely to survive, the monk approaches him to ask for a loan of a hundred franks, which the merchant is happy to make him. He therefore reveals his hypocrisy in being parsimonious towards his wife but generous towards the monk, whom he believes to be his kinsman.

On the next Sunday, the monk returns to the house and hands over the money to the wife, for which she rewards the monk with a night of passion, after which he leaves again.

On returning from his business trip, the merchant tells his wife that he needs to raise some capital, and he goes off to Paris where he hopes to obtain loans from people he knows. He visits John the monk, and asks for the return of his hundred franks. John tells him that he has already returned the money, having given it to the merchant’s wife during his absence.

The merchant concludes his business in Paris and goes home, expecting to make a thousand franks profit from his various deals. He is in such a good mood that he spends the night with his wife “in myrthe” and in the morning “gan embrace his wyf al newe and kiste hire on hir face”.

However, he then complains that her failure to tell him that she had had the loan repaid has led to his embarrassment, having asked his supposed kinsman for the return of money that was no longer owed. She says that she has been misled by the monk, thinking that the money was a gift from him, and admits that she has already spent it. No matter, though, she can repay the merchant well enough by giving him full access to her “joly body”, a deal which he seems quite happy to accept. After an admonishment to be more careful with money in future, the merchant forgives her and the Tale ends, followed by an appreciative comment from the Host who warns the company to beware of such trickery.

Discussion

In contrast to the other abovementioned Tales that concern extramarital dalliance, this is a very gentle story, in which nobody gets hurt. The merchant is cheated out of his hundred franks, but he is repaid between the sheets, the wife appears to have had her marriage repaired, and the monk has had a night with the wife that, as a monk, should certainly not have been on his itinerary.

This is certainly the sort of story we could have expected from the Wife of Bath, as it celebrates the power of sex and puts the woman in charge. The wife of the Tale is clever enough to use the situation to her advantage, and comes out of the story as the eventual winner. The Wife of Bath would certainly approve!

It is perhaps interesting to note that the Shipman has already appeared in the intervening dialogues between the Tales, just before the Wife of Bath begins her long prologue. This is a passage that is disputed by scholars as to where it fits in, but is commonly placed as the epilogue to the Man of Law’s Tale. The Host praises the teller of the previous tale, without mentioning the teller by name, there is some debate as to who the next teller shall be, and the Shipman objects to it being the Parson. Instead, he volunteers to be next, expressing this as “my joly body schal a tale telle”. We have just noted the use of the words “joly body” in the mouth of the wife in the Shipman’s Tale, and they do sound more like words that a woman would use.

Given that it is the Wife of Bath who is next to offer a tale after the Man of Law, and not the Shipman (albeit not on the same manuscript fragment), could that introduction have originally been intended for her lips and not those of the rugged master mariner? This is one of many mysteries in the Canterbury Tales that might have been settled had Chaucer been able to edit the whole work before he died.

Taking the Tale as it stands, it condemns nobody for their actions, even to the extent of apparently condoning the link between money and sex. The monk in effect buys the sexual favours of the wife, and she in turn uses sex as a means of buying herself out of trouble with her husband. This sounds very much like one of the Tales for which Chaucer seeks forgiveness in his final “Retraction”, “thilke that sownen into synne”. Even the behaviour and conversation of the monk excite no criticism. There is no comment from the Monk of the pilgrimage after the Tale is told, so he presumably did not see it as an unfair portrait!

The Tale ends with a slightly naughty pun, the final line being “God us sende taillynge ynough unto oure lyves ende. Amen”. The pious “Amen” is almost sacrilegious, because the word “taille” meant not only “credit”, in monetary and business terms (the origin of “tally” in more modern English), but the female genitals, and the slang term “a piece of tail” is still used today to refer to a sexually attractive woman. The wife has already used the words “score it upon my taille” to invite her husband to bed, so the pun is clearly intentional.

This is a well-written tale, without the long descriptions that spoil the flow of several of the Canterbury Tales. It features another of Chaucer’s lively, sassy young women, who know what they want and how to get it, and it has a few nice plot twists. However, it lacks the sheer joy of life that is found in, say, the Miller’s Tale, and is therefore not generally regarded as one of Chaucer’s best.

© John Welford

The Pardoner's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400) is a collection of stories supposedly told by a set of pilgrims as they make their way to Canterbury. As well as the tales themselves, the pen-portraits of the storytellers are of great interest. Here is an account of Chaucer’s “Pardoner”.

The Pardoner

Chaucer finds it difficult to approve of most of the pilgrims who earn their living from religion, and the Pardoner is no exception. This is a man who takes advantage of gullible people by promising to free them from the pains of Hell by selling them pardons for their sins, supposedly signed by the Pope. He will also sell “holy relics”, charging absurd prices for such things as old bits of wood that came, according to him, from Christ’s cross. He is therefore a 14^th century con-artist.

When the Pardoner is invited by “mine Host”, Harry Bailey, to follow the tale told by the Physician, it soon becomes clear that his main purpose for undertaking this pilgrimage is to make a quick buck or two, either from his fellow pilgrims or from anyone else he might meet along the way. However, we also get to see that this is an “honest rogue”, who is completely open about what he does, and he turns out to be almost likeable.

He demands a drink before he will tell his tale, and we can imagine him getting more and more loquacious as the alcohol takes effect.

The prologue to his tale is in the form of a confession of his business methods, of which he is clearly inordinately proud. Indeed, this is nothing short of a lengthy boast at what a brilliant conman he is.

“… I have won, year by year,

A hundred marks since I was a pardoner.

I stand like a clerk (priest) in my pulpit,

And when the common people are sitting down

I preach just as you have heard before

And tell a hundred false stories more”. [my own translation from the original]

  

The nature of his tale

The sermon that he refers to is on the familiar text from the Letter to Timothy that he quotes in Latin, “Radix malorum est Cupiditas”, or “the love of money is the root of all evil”.  He then pleads with his “congregation” to refrain from avarice, which they can best do by parting with their cash. The Pardoner makes no secret of the fact that he is the most avaricious person there, but, so what, it’s a living isn’t it?

He will have performed this trick in every village he has passed through on his travels, his pulpit being a simple folding stand and box that he erects in an open space, possibly even directly outside the parish church to encourage the pretence that he is acting as the Pope’s representative.

He now proceeds to preach his sermon on the text quoted above, and it constitutes one of the most satisfying tales in the whole canon, being well told and with a wonderful twist in the story. It is a moral tale, and one that we can well imagine a person such as the Pardoner giving out as part of his “patter”. We can easily envisage his village audiences being gripped by its ingenuity and listening intently as it is told.

The Pardoner’s Tale

Three young men have been drinking and enjoying themselves, obviously to excess. The Pardoner really goes to town on the evils of drink, whilst doubtless downing his third or fourth pint of ale contributed by his fellow pilgrims. We can imagine this demagogue catching the moment when he knows that his oratory has captured his audience before he gets going on the story proper.

As the men sit outside the tavern, they see a funeral procession passing by. They ask a boy to tell them who has died, and it turns out to be a friend of theirs. He had, in the boy’s words, been visited by a thief whom men call Death, who has “a thousand slain” with the pestilence.

The three men decide, there and then, that they must seek out “this false traitor Death, he shall be slain, he that so many slayeth”.

They come across an old man, who tells them that he has seen Death, and that they will find him in a grove, under a tree. What they actually find is a pile of gold coins, which causes them to forget all about their search for Death.

Now fully sober, the three work out a plan as to how they are going to guard this treasure and get it home safely. They draw lots, and the youngest is sent to the town to fetch food and wine so that they can wait until nightfall before taking the treasure home without being noticed.

When he has gone, the other two work out that splitting the gold between two of them will profit them better than a three-way split, so they decide to murder their friend when he comes back.

The third young man has had similar thoughts, although he would prefer not to share the treasure at all. He therefore visits an apothecary when he reaches town and buys some rat poison, which he pours into two of the wine bottles that he has bought to take back to the clearing in the woods.

As the Pardoner says, you can work out the rest of the story for yourselves. The two conspirators carry out their plan then decide that, before burying the body, they need a drink. And so all three find Death, just as the old man said they would.

The Pardoner pushes his luck

The Pardoner, his story complete, now forgets himself completely and carries on with the sales pitch. He assails his fellow pilgrims with another diatribe about the consequences of avarice and urges them to buy his pardons and relics, pointing out how lucky they are to have him as one of their number, given that any fatal accident along the way will not result in the victim going to Hell, as long as they have bought their pardon from him first.

He then makes the mistake of turning to the Host as his first customer, who sees through all this claptrap in two seconds flat, threatening the wretched man with instant castration.  This shuts up the Pardoner up, and it is left to the Knight to calm everyone down and urge the Host and the Pardoner to “kiss and make up” which, perhaps surprisingly, they do.

So ends the Pardoner’s Tale, which has been described as the most perfect short story in English literature. If this is true, it is the linking of the teller and the tale that makes it so. It is certainly arguable that this section of the Canterbury Tales is the best thing that Chaucer ever wrote.

© John Welford

The Physician's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

It is not absolutely certain where Chaucer intended the Physician’s Tale to appear in the sequence of the Canterbury Tales, as there are no links between the manuscript fragment that contains the tale (also including that of the Pardoner) and any other tale. However, it is usually placed after the Franklin’s Tale.

The Tale is the old Roman story of Apius and Virginia, which the teller claims to have taken from the works of Livy, but Chaucer is more likely to have used the French “Roman de la Rose” as his source. There is no prologue or introduction to the Tale, which is only 286 lines long.

The Tale

Despite the shortness of the Tale, the Physician spends a long time introducing us to one of the characters, the 14-year-old daughter of Virginius, a knight. The girl is a paragon of virtue, beautiful, modest, with perfect manners, and everything a parent would want a daughter to be. Indeed, the physician goes on to tell us that all children should be brought up with the same degree of care as this “lordes doghtre”. More than 100 lines have been spoken before anything happens at all!

The girl, when in town with her mother, is seen by a Apius, a judge, who is struck by her beauty and determines to have her for his own. He pays a man, Claudius, to present a charge to his court against Virginius, alleging that the latter’s daughter is not his daughter at all, but Claudius’s own servant, who was stolen from him at night. Virginius is given no right to reply, and judgment is given immediately in Claudius’s favour. Virginius is ordered to surrender his daughter to be a ward of the court.

Virginius goes home and calls his daughter (who we now learn is named Virginia) to him. He explains to her that the only alternative to disgrace is death, and that he must kill her out of love. She accepts her fate and is beheaded by her father.

Virginius then takes her head to Apius, whose response is to demand that Virginius be hanged for murdering his daughter. However, the people rise up against the judge and throw him in prison, where he kills himself. Claudius is saved from hanging by Virginius, who has him exiled instead.

The physician ends his tale quickly, exhorting his hearers to turn away from sin. The Host responds to the Tale by expressing his anger at the behaviour of Apius and pity for the fate of Virginia, for “hire beautee was hire deth”.

Discussion

This Tale strikes modern readers as being somewhat unbalanced, with the “action” occupying no more than 160 lines, most of the rest being a eulogy about Virginia’s perfection and a digression on the education of young girls. One could say that the huge build-up of the girl’s character is necessary to make the crime seem all the more terrible, but why that interlude that comes between the descriptions of Virginia’s character and her fate?

It has been suggested that this has something to do with events that took place in the household of John of Gaunt. John was the third son of King Edward III (who reigned 1327-77) and virtual regent during the early years of the reign of Richard II (1377-99), who was Edward’s grandson and John’s nephew. Chaucer and John of Gaunt were close contemporaries and connected by marriage, as Chaucer’s wife and John’s third wife were sisters. John was a close friend of Chaucer and acted as his literary patron.

The passage in question in the Physician’s Tale may be connected with the scandal in John of Gaunt’s court that surrounded his relationship with Chaucer’s future sister-in-law, who is known to history as Katherine Swynford. Katherine was the governess of John of Gaunt’s two daughters, but became his mistress and bore him four children before she eventually married John and her children were legitimized.

Katherine’s example may have been a factor in the extramarital affair of one of her charges, the strong-willed Elizabeth Plantagenet, who became pregnant by the man who was later her second husband. However, her first husband was a child (aged eight at the time of the marriage and fourteen at the time of the affair), Katherine was no longer in a position of authority over her at the time, and Chaucer may already have written the lines in question when this scandal became known.

The lines in the Tale call on governesses of the daughters of noblemen to take special care of their moral upbringing. This message is addressed particularly to such ladies who have fallen from grace themselves and “knowen wel ynough the olde daunce”. The poet, through the mouthpiece of the Physician, is of the view that the best guardians are those who know the consequences of going wrong, and he actually uses the illustration of the poacher turned gamekeeper. So could Chaucer possibly have had the wayward Katherine in mind when he wrote these lines, and be extolling that very waywardness as a virtue?

It has to be said that this is nowhere near the best of the Canterbury Tales. It is probably an early piece of work by Chaucer, although the “upbringing” lines may be a later addition. As a story, it has no plot twists or surprises, and its subject-matter, namely the “honour killing” of an innocent young girl, is unpleasant in the extreme. There are holes in the plot, in that the remedies open to Virginius are surely not limited to the extreme measure he takes. If the people are on his side, why can they not be persuaded to depose Apius before Virginia is sacrificed and not after? It is difficult to sympathise with “tough love” taken to this extreme.

One moral of the tale is not particularly startling, namely “if you have power, don’t abuse it by seducing young women”; but the other, namely “death before dishonour”, is less comfortable to our modern Western sensibilities (although that is not the case in many societies in some less developed parts of the world today). Probably of more interest is the hidden subplot of Chaucer’s own connections with the court of John of Gaunt, alluded to in those lines that have such a tenuous link with the Tale itself.

© John Welford

The Franklin's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

A franklin, in Chaucer’s time, was a freehold landowner whose status would have been that of minor gentry. Chaucer’s pilgrim is described as having been a member of Parliament, a magistrate, a sheriff and a district auditor, and would thus have been a very important person in his local community. He is by no means a poor man, as is evident from the description given in the General Prologue, which concentrates on the man’s food consumption.

Indeed, this is someone who eats as well, or better, than many people would have done had they been from the higher echelons of society. We are not told if he has a large family (we learn later that he has “a son”), or if he entertains his neighbours to dinner on frequent occasions, but his cellars and larders are stocked as if this must be the case. Surely one person cannot eat all those pies, partridges and bream!

Although the only physical description we have is that his beard was as white as a daisy, suggesting that he is no longer young, we can imagine that he was probably extremely fat. At a time when a bad harvest meant that people could starve to death, the morality of a man who consumes so much food must be called into question.

His tale is told immediately after that of the Squire, who would have come from the social stratum just above that of the Franklin. The Squire’s Tale is incomplete, so the words of the Franklin at the end cannot be seen as an interruption but as congratulations at the end of a tale well told. He clearly admires the Squire, and wishes that his own son had turned out to be as refined. This theme is continued in the short prologue to his own Tale, as he laments his “rude speech” and lack of education.

Despite these apologies, he proposes to tell a tale that is a “Breton lay”, which is a genre not found elsewhere in Chaucer’s writings. This is a short romance or adventure story such as the “ancient gentle Britons” were believed to have composed in their Celtic language. This may be based on a myth, because no such stories have come down to us in either Welsh or Breton, but there are several in French and English that make reference to geographical features or incidents that relate to the “Celtic fringe”.

Whatever the source of the tale Chaucer assigns to the Franklin, all the characteristics of the Breton lay are present, including romance, magic and chivalry. The setting is Brittany, the north-west corner of modern-day France that has much in common with the Celtic regions of Britain, hence the name.

The Tale

The Tale starts with an echo of the “marriage debate” that pervaded the tales of the Wife of Bath, the Clerk and the Merchant, as to who should have “mastery” in marriage. Here we have a knight, named Arviragus, who offers marriage to a lady, Dorigen, with the promise that he will not dominate her but allow her a certain degree of freedom, a state of which the Franklin clearly approves.

After a year or so, Arviragus has to go to fight in Britain, and is away for two years. This causes Dorigen great distress and she relies on her friends to keep her sane. Her fears are made worse when she looks down from the cliffs at the black rocks that threaten passing ships, especially the one that she hopes will bring Arviragus back home. The friends therefore decide that she would be happier away from the coast and take her to a secluded garden where there is a feast and dancing.

At the dance is a young squire, named Aurelius, who has long admired Dorigen from afar, in the approved “courtly love” tradition. He eventually gets his chance to talk to Dorigen and declare his love, which she rejects.

However, she then, “in play”, tells him that she will return his love if he can get rid of all those horrible black rocks that she has been so concerned about. She then carries on conversing with her friends until nightfall, at which time the wretched Aurelius prays to Phoebus Apollo, the sun god, to appeal to his sister, the moon goddess, to bring about a high tide of such height and duration that the sea covers all the rocks for two years.

Arviragus comes home, much to the delight of Dorigen, who has forgotten all about the “promise” made to Aurelius. However, the latter has not forgotten, and tells his brother about his despair and the prayer he made to Apollo. The brother recalls that he once saw a book of magic that covered just such an eventuality. This was at Orleans, and he offers to accompany Aurelius there to see if they can find it again. Needless to say, Aurelius jumps at the chance.

As they get close to Orleans, they meet a man who knows immediately why they have come there and takes them to his house, where he demonstrates his magical powers. A deal is struck and, for a fee of a thousand pounds, the magician agrees to remove all the rocks from the coast of Brittany.

The three of them travel to Brittany and the magician works out all the necessary astrological calculations so that the rocks seem to disappear for a week or two. Aurelius then goes to Dorigen (Arviragus is away for a short time) and asks her to abide by her promise, as he has fulfilled its conditions.

Dorigen is distraught, and considers committing suicide as a way out of this dilemma, bringing to mind a whole host of examples from classical history and mythology of women who had sought death rather than dishonour. She weeps and wails for two full days and nights until Arviragus returns, to whom she tells the full story.

Arviragus’s reaction is that Dorigen must keep her promise, because nothing is more important than being true to one’s word. At this point, we can imagine jaws dropping among the pilgrims listening to the Franklin, because he tells his audience not to jump to hasty conclusions. Things may yet turn out for the best, he says.

When Aurelius meets Dorigen, he is suddenly struck by the high-mindedness shown by both Dorigen and Arviragus and realises that he cannot hold her to her promise and thus destroy her marriage. Dorigen returns to her husband, they are completely reconciled and live happily ever after.

However, Aurelius in now in the situation of having failed in his original intention but is still deep in debt to the magician. He therefore goes to the magician and tells him that he felt bound to release Dorigen from her promise, having taken pity on her plight. Hearing this, the magician releases Aurelius from his bond.

The Franklin ends by posing a question to his hearers, namely which of the three “forgivers” in this tale, Arviragus, Aurelius and the magician, was the most “free” or forgiving? As this tale marks the end of one of the manuscript fragments of the Canterbury Tales, we do not know if there was any discussion on this point among the pilgrims, or what Chaucer’s own view might have been on this point. There may well have been a missing page here, because the next tale, that of the Physician, begins with no prologue or other linking material. 

Discussion

So what can we make of this “Breton lay”, and how would we answer the Franklin’s final question today? For one thing, we would surely be uncomfortable with the whole concept of a throwaway remark, similar to “when Hell freezes over”, becoming the focus of so much pain and anguish. We would also, surely, not be happy with the debate over “who is the good guy here”, given that huge damage has been done to the mental health of an innocent woman, and that “forgiving and forgetting” hardly undoes the harm that has been caused.

And what do we make of Arviragus’s siding with Aurelius, who is after all one of his own squires, on the grounds that keeping one’s word is more important than a woman’s sexual purity, and that of his beloved wife at that?

But perhaps that is to look at the Tale with 21^st century eyes rather than those of the 14^th century. For the Franklin’s hearers, in a world where a wife was the virtual property of her husband, and honour meant something very different to what it means in the Western world today, this topic would have had different connotations. For one thing, they would have been well aware of the conventions of courtly love, by which a man could love from afar and never expect the love to be returned. It is the breaking of that convention by Aurelius that sets the course for potential tragedy, and perhaps it is on that basis that his actions are unforgiveable.

Either way, it is a good story, well told despite the Franklin’s “rude speech”, and one that raises interesting questions. The fat man on a horse has earned his next meal.

© John Welford

The Squire's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Squire’s Tale is one of several of the Canterbury Tales that is unfinished, but the reason for this is less clear than it is for the others in this category. The Monk and Chaucer himself are interrupted when fellow pilgrims can stand no more, and the Cook’s Tale appears to have fallen victim to the loss of manuscript pages, but the Squire’s Tale ends in neither fashion and so presents something of a mystery. However, let’s begin at the beginning.

The Squire

The squire is the son of the knight, who told the first tale. He is the only pilgrim whose age we know, from the line in the General Prologue, “Of twenty yeer of age he was, I gesse.” He has seen military service with his father, but his main interest is in wooing the ladies with his singing, dancing and flute-playing. He dresses in ways that would today pose questions about his sexual inclination, as he is “emboudered (embroidered) as it were a meede (maid), al ful of fresshe floures, whyte and reede (red). One can see why the word “gay” has changed its meaning over the centuries!

However, this squire is definitely a ladies’ man, and he fits the image of a troubadour within the courtly love tradition. His romantic tale, curtailed though it is, is clearly going to be in the same vein as that of his father, concerned with a royal court, adventure and enchantment.

His Tale

There is no prologue to the Tale, merely a short introduction (8 lines) that is clearly incomplete but which serves to indicate that the tale will be “somewhat of love”.

The Tale is set in the court of the Tartar King Cambuskan, who can be assumed to be non-historical. He has two sons, Algarsyf and Cambalo, and a daughter, Canace. To mark twenty years on the throne, Cambuskan hosts a magnificent feast, during which a strange knight rides into the hall on a horse made of brass. He holds a mirror in his hand, has a gold ring on his thumb, and a bare sword hanging by his side.

The knight announces that the brass horse is a gift to Cambuskan from the King of Araby and India. This is (we might have guessed!) a magic horse that can take the king anywhere he wants within a day and fly through the air if necessary.

The mirror will, at time of adversity, reveal who is friend or foe. A lady could use it to tell whether an intending lover is true or false. The ring enables the wearer to understand the speech of birds, and also to know which plants will cure wounds. The mirror and the ring are gifts for Lady Canace.

The sword will cut through any armour and inflict wounds that can only be healed by the flat of the sword being applied to the same place.

The knight then rides back out of the hall and dismounts in the courtyard, where the brass horse stands still and cannot be moved. The knight is invited to join the feast, the sword and the mirror are taken to a high tower, and the ring is presented to Canace. There is more feasting and dancing, during which the knight dances with Canace.

When the feast is over, Cambuskan asks the knight to show him how to ride the brass horse. The knight explains that there is a pin inside the horse’s ear that must be turned. The king then needs to say where he wants to go and, on arrival, turn another pin. Another trick is that the owner can turn a pin that will make the horse invisible.

The next day, Canace is up and about before the rest of the family and decides to go for a walk, accompanied by five or six attending ladies. On the walk she comes across a female peregrine falcon that is bleeding from self-inflicted wounds, high in a dead tree. Having the magic ring, Canace is able to ask the bird what is wrong and to offer to find herbs to make it better.

The falcon falls to the ground and is picked up by the princess. The bird explains that she gave her love to a male falcon who proved to be false and eventually flew off when a female kite came along. Canace has pity for the female falcon and takes her home, where she makes ointments to treat the wounds, using her new-found knowledge of herbs.

The squire now breaks off from his narrative to tell us how the tale will develop and involve the other characters. King Cambuskan will win “many a citee”, Algarsyf will escape from peril thanks to the brass horse, and will find himself a wife called Theodora, and Cambalo will fight with “the bretheren two, for Canace er that he myghte hire wynne”.

And that is as much as we get. After only two lines of the third part of the Tale, the Franklin then thanks the Squire for his Tale and speaks in his praise, wishing that his own son was of the same calibre, instead of losing his money at dice and keeping bad company. The Host then interjects to remind the Franklin that he is also required to tell a “tale or two” (as opposed to the four tales of the original stipulation!), and the Franklin then agrees to be the next storyteller.

Discussion

In analysing the Squire’s Tale, what are we to make of its ending? As mentioned in Part 1, two other Tales are interrupted, but in nothing like as polite a manner as is done by the Franklin. Chaucer’s own romantic tale, the parody of “Sir Thopas”, is rudely interrupted by the Host, and the Monk is given short shrift by the Knight. They both use the same phrase, “namoore of this”, to indicate their displeasure, which is a mile away from the Franklin’s, “In feith, Squier, thow hast thee wel yquit and gentilly.” If the Tale is so terrible that it must be aborted, it seems very strange that it would be the Franklin who does so, especially as the words he uses are exactly those that would be expected if the Tale had run its full course.

That said, there are certainly reasons why the Tale might have been interrupted. The Squire is, as noted above, a flowery young man, and he uses very flowery language to tell his Tale. For example, it takes him some 130 lines just to relate the distress of the falcon at her husband’s falseness. As indicated in the closing lines of the Tale, there is a huge amount still to be told, involving the other characters and magic items. We have no idea, for example, how the sword and the mirror will come into play. It has taken the Squire more than 650 lines to get this far, which is more than the Pardoner will take to tell the whole of his beautifully intricate story, and the young man has hardly started.

We have no way of knowing how the story would have developed, because there are no extant sources for it. It is possible that the story was original to Chaucer, and he simply did not know how to end it. He was an excellent developer of plots but is not known as an originator of them; maybe this is an example of why he preferred to adapt other people’s stories.

Another possibility is that the whole thing should be taken as a parody of the troubadour tradition. Here is a young man who can start a story but cannot finish it. His father has the gift of being able to tell a long story, and go off at all sorts of tangents but eventually reach a conclusion, but the son’s inexperience shows through until he is gently rescued by the kindly Franklin who spares his blushes by praising him to the skies.

Another unanswered question is posed just before the Tale ends, where the Squire mentions that Cambalo will fight the two brothers for the hand of Canace. But surely Cambalo is one of the brothers, and Canace is his sister? What is going on here? An easy explanation might be that this is a mistake, and another name should be inserted in place of that of Cambalo; the knight who brought the gifts and danced with Canace seems like an obvious candidate. However, in the introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale we read of the “wikke (wicked) ensample of Canacee, that loved hir owene brother sinfully”. So perhaps there is a tale of incest to be told after all, and could that be something that the Franklin did not want to hear? Or did Chaucer see a difficulty in aligning the gentle nature of Canace, the healer of birds, with “wickedness”, and decide to abandon ship before things got too awkward?

There are still matters that do not add up, however. Who are the “bretheren two” if Cambalo is not one of them? There are many examples in the Canterbury Tales that show that Chaucer died before he was able to edit his work and put right all these inconsistencies and non sequiturs, another one being the apparent change from the original demand for four tales per pilgrim to a “tale or two”. In the film world an important role is played by the continuity editor, who is paid to make sure that silly mistakes do not occur. Chaucer could have used one with profit!

© John Welford