The Canterbury Tales: Week 8

The Pardoner, Gangbangers, Barbie, and the Bubonic Plague

[The illustration of The Three Revellers and the Gold, by Warwick Goble, from The Pardoner’s Tale of The Canterbury Tales, in The Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1912. Photo credit: Susan Isakson/Alamy]

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil¹

Let’s consider The Pardoner’s Tale first on its own. It is a tale that stands mightily well on its own, even apart from its context in the larger collection of tales and its teller.

The Pardoner’s Tale draws on the medieval tradition of the “exemplum,” a short moral tale included within a sermon in order to convey a lesson.² The exemplum is sort of the medieval version of the anecdote, so ubiquitous in sermons today. Earlier, in his prologue, the Pardoner states that the story he will tell—which consists of the one sermon he preaches over and over wherever he goes—is an exemplum and he adds, condescendingly, that he preaches it because it is an old tale and ignorant people like those to whom he preaches love stories that they can remember and retell (lines 147-50).

The tale begins in the familiar way of many old tales, with a version of “once upon a time”: “In Flanders once was a company …” (line 175). This "company” is basically a gang—a group of young men who live a riotous, roving life of partying, lechery, and gluttony.

At this, the Pardoner abruptly abandons the tale he has just begun and shifts into sermon mode for a couple hundred lines. Gluttony, he observes, turning to “Holy Writ” for evidence, is the source of many other sins, (line 194), the cause first of confusion (line 211) then damnation.

Warning against both drunkenness and gluttony (which he treats as two of the same kind of sin), the Pardoner points to Lot and Herod as examples of those who fell under these sins. He identifies gluttony as the sin that caused Adam and Eve to fall and one the Apostle Paul has much to say about. Even human history apart from the Bible shows the dangers of excess, as the Pardoner sees exemplified in the downfall of the great Attila.

Next the Pardoner warns against gambling, which he describes as the mother of lies, deceit, oaths, blasphemy, and killing—the killing of people, money, and time. Even taking the Lord’s name in vain, which is forbidden by the second commandment, the Pardoner warns, often arises from gambling, and he closes his sermon with a final point about the sin of swearing.

Then he returns to his tale, a story of young men who, as we’ve already seen, lead lives steeped in these deadly sins. While chilling out in a tavern, they are confronted with the presence of death when they hear a funeral bell toll outside.

It’s like in Barbie, the entire plot of which hinges on the moment when Barbie—in the midst of a lively Barbie dance party in her technicolor Barbie world—suddenly blurts out, to the horror of all her Barbie friends, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” Here’s the clip from that brilliant scene (it’s worth the entire four minutes, but this line occurs at about 2 /12 minutes in):

The young revelers (the Pardoner’s, not Barbie’s) learn that the corpse is that of a friend of theirs who was slain suddenly in the night by a thief named Death.³ The indignant comrades determine to seek out this rascally fellow, Death, and slay him. On their way, they encounter an old man who wishes to be taken by Death but is not. The young men treat the old man rudely (never do this in a morality tale, or ever, really), demanding he tell them where they can find this dude, Death. The man tells them they will find Death under a tree in a nearby grove, and he points the way. The young men run to the tree where they find, not Death, but gold—but then, through their own greedy devices, they do find Death after all, just as the old man had promised.

As John Donne, a wiser man than these gangbangers, wrote some years later in one of his Meditations, “… never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Recall that in his prologue, the Pardoner says his single sermon (which is this tale he tells) illuminates the theme, “Radix malorum est cupidatas” (line 46)—literally, “Avarice [greed] is the root of evil” (from 1 Timothy 6:10). It also illustrates the old axiom, “There’s no honor among thieves,” but I suspect that the Pardoner doesn’t intend to communicate this lesson.

The tale is also perfectly crafted (and is often considered one of the best of all the tales). It turns on a number of ironies:

·        The young men are full of life and eager to live, but they die.

·        The old man wants to die, but he can’t.

·        The gold the young men think will bring them abundant life instead brings them death.

·        Death is not a person they can meet and defeat, as they think, but rather Death comes from within, from their own sin, their own greed.

·        The rioters vow to kill Death, but Death kills them. (They do not know, as Donne, again, does that, ultimately, “Death, thou shalt die.”)

It’s a powerful tale, a moving sermon, and a deeply moral story.

And it is told by a deeply immoral person.

What do we do with a message of truth told by someone so wicked?

This is a question that vexes literature lovers, art aficionados, and churchgoers alike. I won’t even attempt to answer that here (but would love your thoughts on this, my readers).

If we return to the context of the tale, we find more ironies.

First, the Pardoner—who is driven entirely by greed and admits this is so—tells a forceful tale (and sermon) on this very sin in order to guilt those who hear it into giving up their money--to him. And he began it all by confessing this to his fellow pilgrims. You’d think that having told them exactly what he’s up to he’d know better than to try to pull this same trick on them.

Yet, at the close of his tale, he turns to the pilgrims and exhorts them to partake of his pardons, relics, and wares and yield their money up to him. This portrayal is fascinating in its psychological depth and insight. The Pardoner isn’t stupid. Yet he is so caught up in his habitual vice, his usual schtick, that it’s as though he can’t even help himself. He can’t stop doing what he does so well and so often.

He turns to the Host and urges him to be the first to kiss his relics.

But Harry Bailly isn’t having it. Swearing an oath (I guess the sermon didn’t take), the Host says he wishes he had the Pardoner’s testicles in his hands: he’d cut them off and enshrine them—in hog dung (lines 660-67).

And here is another of Chaucer’s sly subtleties. In The General Prologue, the narrator says he knows not whether the Pardoner is a gelding or a mare. Either way, (figuratively) the Pardoners doesn’t have any what the Host threatens to seize.

But what the Pardoner lacks down there, he sure tries to compensate for by projecting on to everyone else his own besetting sin. Imagine that.

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Next up:

• The Nun’s Priest’s Tale

• Chaucer’s Retraction

We will be getting to Shakespeare soon! I am thinking of covering at least one or two works in between, however. For Christmas, I’d love to discuss the very Christmas-y medieval drama, The Second Shepherds’ Play. It’s about 30 pages long and available in several versions online. A work of that length might be more than you want to read, though. And then there is Everyman and Dr. Faustus … Thoughts, dear readers?

1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. By Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 117.

2. Medieval sermon literature is a literary genre in and of itself, with a vast body of scholarship within the secular academy.

3. The story is set in the context of the bubonic plague or “Black Death,” which began when Geoffrey Chaucer was a boy and in some cities wiped out 1/3 of the population. This historical reality is referenced in the tale when the boy in the tavern reports back to the young rioters that the thief named Death has slain a thousand people with the pestilence (lines 382-91).