The Summoner's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

The two least pleasant of Chaucer’s characters are the Friar and the Summoner, both of whom earn their livings by deceit, and who are also shown as being at each other’s throats for at least part of the pilgrimage journey. When they come to tell their tales, the Friar recounts the story of a rascally summoner who meets the Devil and whose dishonest behaviour leads to him being carried off to Hell, and the Summoner is then determined to reply in like manner.

The Summoner’s prologue consists of him insulting the Friar by, in effect, telling a mini-tale of a friar who has a vision of being shown round Hell by an angel. Seeing no fellow friars, our Friar assumes that this must be because friars never go to Hell. The angel then shows him Satan himself and asks him to lift his tail. When Satan does so, twenty thousand friars fly out of his backside like bees from a hive.

Having told this crude joke at the Friar’s expense, the Summoner proceeds with his tale, which, not surprisingly, concerns a friar and, again not surprisingly, is highly insulting. These people really do not like each other!

In medieval England, “mendicant” friars were members of religious orders, such as the Franciscans or Dominicans, who were officially barred from owning property of their own and had to earn their living by working for the community and receiving alms. By Chaucer’s time, many friars had become grasping and corrupt, and the friar in the Summoner’s tale would probably have been recognised by Chaucer’s original readers as being typical of his kind. The humour would hardly have worked had this not been the case.

The Summoner’s Tale

A friar goes to a village in Yorkshire to preach and beg. However, his sermon entreats his hearers to save their souls by ceasing to encumber themselves with worldly possessions, which they should give to the Church instead, represented, as it happens, by himself!

In going from house to house, he makes a list of all the people who have given him the best hospitality, promising to pray for them. However, once he has been well provided with food and other supplies, he scratches out the names to make room for more.

(At this point in the telling of the tale, the “real” Friar tries to interrupt, but the Host tells him to shut up and lets the Summoner continue.)

The friar comes to the house of Thomas, whom he has clearly visited many times before. There is a nice touch in Chaucer’s description of him shoving the cat out of the way so that he can sit down. However, Thomas is unwell and lying on a couch. The friar tells him about all the prayers he has offered on Thomas’s behalf and then greets Thomas’s wife as she comes into the room, with an embrace that sounds a bit over the top for a Man of God to bestow.

On being invited to stay for dinner, the friar gives his order, and is then told that the couple have recently lost their child, who died just after the friar’s last visit. The friar then assures them that he witnessed the death in a vision, in which he saw the child’s soul being borne to Heaven. Not only that, but two other friars saw the same thing, and the whole convent said a Mass on the child’s behalf. He tells them that holy people such as himself, who live in abject poverty, have a fast track to God and their prayers are far more effectual than those of ordinary people, especially the rich. In fact, he goes on about it at some considerable length, totally forgetting the distress of the bereaved couple.

When Thomas can get a word in edgeways, he tells the friar that he has not been getting good value for all the money he has spent on buying prayers from the various friars who have passed his way. The friar has an answer for this, namely that Thomas has been spreading his gold too thinly, and he should instead forget about all those other “leeches” and give only to one convent, namely the friar’s own.

He also warns Thomas about the sin of anger. We can well imagine just how angry Thomas is getting with all this garbage being spouted at him by a man who is clearly there only to eat him out of house and home!

The new sermon takes the form of several short stories, firstly about a king who condemned three of his knights to death out of misplaced anger. The friar then talks about two other kings, Cambyses and Cyrus, whose anger led to dire consequences. Just how relevant these stories are to Thomas’s condition is a moot point; we can imagine that these little tales are part of the friar’s stock-in-trade, added to any sermon when the sin of anger is the subject at hand.

The sermon preached, the friar returns to his main theme, namely Thomas’s financial contribution. Thomas has clearly had more of this than he can stand; as the Summoner says, “he would that the friar had been on fire”. He then tells the friar that he has a special gift for him, that he will give on the firm condition that the friar shares it equally with all the other friars in his convent.

The friar agrees to the condition, and follows Thomas’s instruction to put his hand down behind Thomas’s back, as far his buttocks, where the “treasure” is to be found. Once the hand is in place, Thomas lets fly an enormous fart. The friar is then chased out of the house.

The story might well have ended at this point, but the Summoner is keen to make his attack on the Friar of the pilgrimage as savage as possible. The friar of the story, having been so keen to warn against giving way to anger, now does precisely that, and storms off to the house of the lord of the manor to seek justice for this slight.

However, once the friar has told the lord, his wife and his squire about the “blasphemous” fart, the latter are far more interested in the problem of how a fart can be divided into twelve so that it can be shared by all the friars in the convent. The squire solves the problem by suggesting that all the friars should stand around a cartwheel, each with their nose at the end of a spoke, and the fart be delivered at the hub so that its stink will spread equally down each spoke. We are not told what the friar did next, only that he did not applaud the squire with the same enthusiasm as everyone else. We can imagine the rest.

The Summoner’s Tale might have been based on a story known to Chaucer, or it could be entirely original. Whatever the case, it is a beautifully told tale that works by gradually building up to a wholly unexpected denouement, that we can imagine would have had the pilgrims collapsing in fits of laughter, with one notable exception. The “coda” to the Tale, namely the added detail involving the squire and the cartwheel, only serves to prolong the mockery of the pilgrim Friar, who we can picture as having got the worse of the exchange with the Summoner.

It is because of tales like this that Chaucer is justly renowned as English Literature’s first comic genius.

© John Welford