Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales are notable for the tale between the tales, namely the
framework within which the tales are told. In part, these consist of running
battles between certain of the pilgrims who have developed a thoroughgoing
dislike for each other. One such pair are the Friar and the Summoner, whose
tales are told at each other’s expense.
In 14th
century England, a mendicant friar was a member of a religious order, such as
the Franciscans, who were forbidden to own property and had therefore to depend
on the charity of the community in which they lived. They were supposed to earn
their living by doing good deeds and preaching the gospel, but many became
corrupt, such as the Friar on Chaucer’s pilgrimage. This is a man who hears confessions for a price,
and the more he is paid, the more valuable will be his absolution.
Men such as
this were always going to be at daggers drawn with summoners, whose job was to
issue summonses to ecclesiastical courts, and who had their own protection
rackets to operate. A summoner who was willing to overlook an offence, for a
price, was hardly going to be best pleased to find that a friar had got there
first and absolved the offender, again for a price. Chaucer was probably
representing a typical example of the war between friars and summoners to see
which could outdo the other in corruption.
In this case,
the battle has been foretold by the interruptions of the Friar and the Summoner
at the end of the Wife of Bath’s prologue. The Friar promises to tell a tale
about a summoner, and the Summoner offers to reply in like manner. The host has
to separate them before the Wife of Bath can continue, and, when she has
finished, they are at each other’s throats once more during the short prologue
to the Friar’s Tale. The host has no option but to invite the Friar to
continue.
The Friar’s
Tale
The summoner
of the tale works for an archdeacon who is very keen to prosecute cases of
lechery and “small tithing”, by which was meant the equivalent of today’s
declaration of less income than one has actually earned. The summoner, who
would be paid a fee for every case that he brought to court, was very good at
spying out such cases and excusing certain people who acted as informers on
others. He would issue false summonses and accept payment for overlooking them,
and would withhold half the fees that should have gone to the archdeacon.
Another racket was to act as a pimp, arresting the men for fornication and letting
the women go free.
One day, when
on his way to summons a widow on a false charge, he meets a yeoman on the road
and rides along with him, telling the yeoman that he is a bailiff about to
collect a rent. The yeoman says that he too is a bailiff, but not from these
parts. He invites the summoner to visit him some time, promising him a gift of
gold and silver when he does so. The summoner thinks he has found someone of
like mind to himself and, admitting that he lives by extortion and has no
conscience in such matters, asks the yeoman if he has any tricks of the trade
that he would be willing to pass on.
The yeoman
now reveals himself to be a fiend from Hell, in human form. He explains that he
will adopt whatever shape is likely to gain him what he wants, although fiends
such as himself sometimes work for God, as in the case of Job in the Old
Testament. The summoner, despite this knowledge, is still quite happy to do
business alongside the “yeoman”.
They ride
into town, where they find a carter whose cart has got stuck in the mud and
whose horses are failing to pull it free. The carter swears at the horses,
saying “The devel have al, bothe hors and cart and hey”. The summoner asks the
fiend if he should not take the man at his word and seize the prize, but the
fiend explains that the carter did not really mean what he said. This is proved
when the horses do eventually succeed and the cart moves on, the carter
praising them with “Jhesu Crist yow blesse … I pray God save thee, and Seinte
Loy!” Unless the words match the true thoughts, the devil cannot act.
They move on,
and the summoner finds the old woman that he came to see. He explains to the
fiend that he is determined to get twelve pence out of her, despite not knowing
of anything that she has done wrong. He presents his summons, but she says that
she is unable to travel the distance to the archdeacon’s court. Can someone
else appear on her behalf? The summoner agrees, on payment of twelve pence,
claiming that very little of that will go to him. However, she begs him for
mercy, because she does not have that much money.
The summoner
persists, and says that if she cannot pay, he will take her new pan, which will
also be payment of an old debt when he summonsed her for immorality. She
refutes all this, stating that she has never been summonsed in all her life,
and was always true to her late husband. She ends by cursing the summoner with
the words “Unto the devel, blak and rough of hewe, yeve (give) I thy body and
my panne also!”
The fiend
checks with the old woman to make sure that she means what she says, which
indeed she does, unless the summoner repents. This is certainly not his
intention, as he then says that he would, if he could, take all her clothes as
well. This was not the wisest thing to say under the circumstances, as the
fiend now claims his prize, namely the summoner and, of course, the pan.
The Friar
ends his tale with a short sermon aimed mostly at his fellow pilgrims, the gist
of which is that the devil can be resisted, with God’s grace, and has no power
to tempt unless we wish to be tempted. He cannot, however, resist a last dig,
for now, at the Summoner, praying in his last two lines that “thise somonours
hem repente of hir mysdedes, er that the feend hem hente (catch)”.
Discussion
This tale,
and that of the Summoner which follows it, are “fabliaux”, or short moral
tales, for which various parallels have been found, although the anecdotes,
which have no great depth in themselves, are richly overlaid with description,
characterization and witty dialogue that are clearly original to Chaucer at his
most accomplished.
It has to be
remembered that people in Chaucer’s time, and possibly Chaucer himself, had a
very literal view of Heaven and Hell, and would not have been surprised to
learn that an agent of Hell could be found on an English lane, ready to strike
up a conversation with a passing summoner. People then would have accepted that
anyone they met could have been a fiend in human shape, and that the
personable, chatty yeoman could take someone off to meet Satan himself should
he be so inclined. We should also not be surprised at the idea that an angel of
the devil could also work as an angel of God, and state that “withouten hym we
have no myght”.
We have, in
modern times, come to regard Heaven and Hell as polar opposites, but the
medieval view was that all creation was by God and that the nether regions were
simply the lower end of a continuous spectrum with Heaven at the top and Earth
in the middle. Some people have regarded this Tale as being blasphemous, but that
is a modern view. Milton
What is perhaps
surprising is the lack of fear on the part of the summoner, and indeed his
fascination to learn more about how the fiend operates. Why, when he knows that
a curse to Hell can only work if the curser really intends it, does he make it
absolutely certain that he will be condemned himself? Is he just stupid? Or is
this the Friar saying that summoners are in any case agents of the devil who
know full well that they are destined to go to Hell? Whatever the reason, one
can fully understand the angry reaction of the “real” Summoner.
The Friar’s
Tale is wittier than the Summoner’s Tale, and does not have the knockabout
coarseness of the latter. It has elements that are found again in the later
Pardoner’s Tale, which is another tale told by a man who uses his position to
dupe innocent naive people of what little money they have.
However, it
is with the Summoner’s Tale that the Friar’s Tale should be read in
conjunction. The tales are, in effect, a double tale in that they form part of
the whole dialogue and fight between two men who are as bad as each other.
© John
Welford
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