Church versus Churls

The ironic dynamic of Chaucer's fabliaux is usually taken as anti-romance. The Miller is held to ‘quite’ the Knight's Tale (I 3127) by parodying his noble love-conflict, with a shared line to pin the joke (2779 and 3204), then the Reeve reverses the reversal on behalf of his trade; anti-romance can also be heard in the parodic voices and behaviour of Damian in the Merchant's Tale and Chauntecleer in the Nun's Priest's Tale. Yet the French fabliaux realized not ironic romance but louche battles between clerics and churls, and there is an insistent religious referentiality in the Oxbridge diptych, as indeed in the tales of Shipman, Friar, Summoner and Pardoner. It is a Monk whom the Miller displaces as a tale-teller, not a Knight (3118–19); Chaucer, like his French predecessors, may well be directing his humorous venom at the presumptions of the lower orders in both Church and town, with anti-romance vulgarity as only part of their general comic unacceptability.

Church on Churls

Inappropriate code-switching from Church to world is a recurrent motif in the presentation of the religious orders in the General Prologue. Loaded words like ‘curteisie’ and ‘countrefete’ (I 132, 139) position the Prioress as quasi-secular, and the language grows more cutting: neither ‘conscience’ nor ‘Amor’ have in her purview anything to do with God (142, 162). The rhymes in the Monk's description imply the disabling secularity of the man the Host will later address as ‘My lord the Monk’ (VII 1924): ‘maistrie/venerie’ (165–6), ‘able/stable’ (167–8), ‘cloystre/ oystre’ (181–2), ‘enoynt/poynt’ (199–200), and ‘estaat/prelaat‘(203–4 – it is his horse's ‘estaat’, but the word implies the lordly property that so much interests the rider). Both language and rhyme proclaim the Friar a traditional sexual and financial predator with ‘daliaunce and fair language’ (211) and spectacular sequences, almost laisses, of romance rhymes at 218–24 and 244–51. Brilliant as they are, these satiric verbal manoeuvrings are not pursued in these characters’ tales, which pose more elusive questions about the use and misuse of church discourse in saint's legend, tragedy and devil-fable.