pardoners+tale.pdf

The Pardoner, his Prologue, and his Tale

Here is the portrait of the Pardoner from the General Prologue

where he is accompanied by the disgusting Summoner who is his friend, his

singing partner and possibly his lover. The even more corrupt Pardoner

professes to give gullible people pardon for their sins in exchange for money, as

well as a view of his pretended holy relics which will bring them blessings. He

too is physically repellent: he has thin scraggly hair of which, however, he is

absurdly vain, and his high voice and beardlessness suggest that he is not a full

man but something eunuch-like, again a metaphor for his barren spiritual state.

With him there rode a gentle PARDONER

him = Summoner

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Of Rouncival, his friend and his compeer

colleague

That straight was comen from the court of Rome.

had come directly

Full loud he sang "Come hither love to me." 1

This Summoner bore to him a stiff burdoun.

bass melody

Was never trump of half so great a sound.

trumpet

This pardoner had hair as yellow as wax

But smooth it hung as does a strike of flax.

hank

By ounces hung his locks that he had,

By strands

And therewith he his shoulders overspread.

But thin it lay, by colpons, one by one,

clumps

But hood, for jollity, weard he none,

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For it was trussd up in his wallet:

bag

Him thought he rode all of the new jet,

fashion

Dishevelled; save his cap he rode all bare.

hair loose / bareheaded

Such glaring eyen had he as a hare.

eyes

A vernicle had he sewed upon his cap. 2

A pilgrim badge

His wallet lay before him in his lap

bag

Bretfull of pardons, come from Rome all hot. 3

Crammed full

1 672. The rhyme between "Rome / to me" may have been forced or comic even in Chaucer's day; it is

impossible or ludicrous today. The Pardoner probably has not been anywhere near Rome; claiming so is

simply part of his pitch to the gullible. His relationship to the Summoner is not obvious but appears to be

sexual in some way.

2 685: Vernicle : a badge with an image of Christ's face as it was believed to have been imprinted on the

veil of Veronica when she wiped His face on the way to Calvary. Such badges were frequently sold to

pilgrims.

3 686-7: He has filled his bag with bits of paper or parchment purporting to be pardons "hot"

A voice he had as small as hath a goat.

thin

No beard had he nor never should he have;

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As smooth it was as it were late y-shave.

recently shaved

I trow he were a gelding or a mare.

guess

His "relics"

But of his craft, from Berwick unto Ware

trade

Ne was there such another pardoner,

For in his mail he had a pillowber

bag / pillowcase

Which that he said was Our Lady's veil.

Our Lady's = Virgin Mary's

He said he had a gobbet of the sail

piece

That Saint Peter had when that he went

Upon the sea, till Jesus Christ him hent.

pulled him out

He had a cross of latten full of stones

brass

And in a glass he hadd piggs' bones.

But with these "relics", when that he found

A poor parson dwelling upon land,

in the country

Upon one day he got him more money

Than that the parson got in months tway;

two

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And thus, with feignd flattery and japes

tricks

He made the parson and the people his apes.

fools, dupes

His skill in reading, preaching and extracting money from people

But truly to tellen at the last,

He was in church a noble ecclesiast.

churchman

Well could he read a lesson and a story.

But alderbest he sang an offertory 1

best of all

For well he wist when that song was sung

knew

He must preach and well afile his tongue

polish his sermon

Therefore he sang the merrierly and loud.

he knew how

from Rome like cakes from an oven. Illiterate people are often impressed by any written

document.

1 710: offertory : the point in the Mass when the people made their offerings to the priest, and to the

Pardoner when he was there. The prospect of money put him in good voice.

To winn silver as he full well could.

THE PARDONER'S TALE

Introduction

The Pardoner is a sinister character, one of the most memorable on the pilgrimage

to Canterbury and in the whole of English literature. The portrait of him in the

General Prologue shows him as deficient in body and depraved in soul, his physical

attributes or lack of them a metaphor for the sterile spirit that inhabits his body or

lurks in it like a toad in a cellar. His appearance arouses not so much disgust as

dis-ease, a profound uneasiness.

He is a confidence man operating a game that still flourishes — manipulating

people's religious gullibility, their shame, greed, superstition, etc. Like many

others after him, he uses a real rhetorical gift to "stir the people to devotion" so

that they will give their pennies, and "namely unto me," as he says. Interestingly

enough he knows that his eloquent preaching may in fact help people to turn away

from their sins; that is all right, provided that he profits in the process, and his

profits are not in the spiritual realm, but strictly material — money, wool, cheese,

wheat, gold rings.

The Pardoner's trade grew out of a legitimate if dubious church practice that was

difficult to understand and easy to abuse — the doctrine and practice of

indulgences, the abuses of which were still causing trouble in the sixteenth century

and which were the direct cause of Luther's challenge to the Catholic Church that

led to the Reformation. The doctrine of indulgences was roughly this: Even when

you had confessed your sins, expressed your regret and a determination to try to

avoid them in the future, there was still something owing, penance of some kind,

which could take various forms: fasting, going on a pilgrimage, saying certain

prayers, giving money to the poor or to some other good cause like the building of

a church. It was in the last-mentioned that a fatal slippage took place. Careless or

unscrupulous people implied that if you gave money to a good cause, which they

represented, that act in itself bought forgiveness for your sins, even without

confession or contrition. This was not, of course, church teaching. But it was an

idea widely disseminated and widely believed, because it satisfied at the same time

the need for easy forgiveness in some, and the need for easy money in others. The

Pardoner gave false assurances of God's pardon; the deluded sinner gave real

money in exchange.

PARDONER'S TALE

The Pardoner's Prologue is an astonishing soliloquy, a public confession, but a

confession without a trace of the repentance that would make us or God want to

forgive him. It is astonishing partly because some readers have difficulty believing

that anyone would expose himself and his tricks so blatantly to a group of pilgrims

of varying ranks in society and varying ranges of education. Critics of the older

school who felt that all fiction should approximate the standards of realism of the

nineteenth-century novel, found a plausible explanation for the Pardoner's

indiscreet garrulousness in the fact that he has a drink of "corny ale" before he

begins his tale.

But of course one no longer needs such "realistic" explanations. Two or three

days glancing at daytime talk shows on television will convince anyone that some

people will publicly confess to, even boast about, depravities most of us did not

know existed. Before Chaucer's own time the confession of Faux Semblant in one

of his favorite poems, The Romance of the Rose, provided a precedent for his

Pardoner. He has literary successors too: look at Richard III in Shakespeare's play

two hundred years later who is not unlike the Pardoner in some ways — physically

and morally deformed and given to making confessional soliloquies. Look too at

Iago or Shylock. They all tell us things about themselves that no person in his

right mind would do. But they are not persons, only characters in fictions which

expect the audience to share the conventions, in this case the Pardoner's dramatic

soliloquy. We accept the convention that in a mounted procession of about thirty

people on thirty horses everyone can hear every word of every tale told by any

other. This is realistically unlikely. Neither do people tell tales in polished verse.

Except in fiction.

At the heart of the sermon / tale that the Pardoner tells is an extended exemplum , a

story told to illustrate a point that the preacher is making. Pardoners had a

deservedly bad name for their moral depravity and their selling of religion; they

were also known for telling lewd tales in church to keep their audiences amused so

that they might be more forthcoming with money at offertory time. According to

Wycliffe, many popular preachers, including Pardoners, were notorious for the

filthiness of their exempla , more especially objectionable for being told in church.

That is why, when the Host calls on the Pardoner for a tale, "the gentles gan to

cry: Let him tell us of no ribaldry." Since the "gentles" have listened with

enjoyment already to the very ribald tales of the Miller and the Reeve, they must

have been expecting something really objectionable from the Pardoner. It is a

delicious irony that this ugly but clever man disappoints their expectations so

splendidly with a sermon that would have done credit to a devout and eloquent

member of the Order of Preachers.

This story was old when Geoffrey Chaucer put it in the mouth of his Pardoner in

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