In his contribution to a recent collection of essays on the English ‘Loathly Lady’ tales, Russell A. Peck makes a persuasive case for John Gower's Tale of Florent being ‘the first sustained Loathly Lady narrative in English literature’, and thus the direct source of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale. This narrative tells of a knight accused of murder (though he has in fact killed his man in a fair fight) who is offered a reprieve on condition that he can discover what it is that all women most desire. At his wit's end to answer this conundrum, he encounters a Loathly Lady who offers to supply the answer on condition that he marry her. He ponders this offer for a while:

After carefully weighing his options, he decides to accept the offer – his life is saved, and the tale ends happily when the hag is magically transformed into a beautiful young damsel. We learn that her hideous shape had been due to a stepmother's curse and that only by winning both the ‘love and sovereinete’ of a knight that ‘alle othre passeth of good name’ (Confessio, I, lines 1847–9) had the lady been able to break the spell – Florent satisfying the second condition by having the good sense to defer to her judgment in the solution of a riddle. Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale follows a similar pattern, except that the initial offence is the more shameful one of rape, the Loathly Lady offers her solution in exchange for an unspecified favour (only later does the knight learn that it is to be marriage), and the motif of the stepmother's curse is dropped. Two later stories – ‘The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell’ and ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawain’ – displace Gower's narrative motifs even further.