The Reeve's Prologue and Tale
Encyclopedia
"The Reeve's Tale" is the third story told in Geoffrey Chaucer
's The Canterbury Tales
. The reeve
, named Oswald in the text, is the manager of a large estate who reaped incredible profits for his master and himself. He is described in the Tales as skinny and bad-tempered. The Reeve had once been a carpenter
, a profession mocked in the previous Miller's Tale
. Oswald responds with a tale that mocks the Miller's profession.
The tale is based on a popular fabliau
(also the source of the Sixth Story of the Ninth Day of The Decameron
) of the period with many different versions, the "cradle-trick." Chaucer improves on his sources with his detailed characterization and sly humour linking the act of grinding corn with sex. The northeastern accent of the two clerks is also the earliest surviving attempt in English
to record a dialect from an area other than that of the main writer. Chaucer's works are written with traces of the southern English or London accent of himself and his scribes, but he extracts comedy from imitating accents, a comedic device
that is still popular today.
is a miller
who lives in Trumpington
near Cambridge
and who steals wheat
and meal
brought to him for grinding. Simpkin is also a bully and expert with knives (q.v. the coulter
in the Miller's Tale). His wife is the portly daughter of the town clergyman
(and therefore illegitimate, as Catholic
priests do not marry). They have a twenty-year-old daughter Malyne and a six-month-old son.
When Simpkin overcharged for his latest work grinding corn for Soler Hall, a Cambridge University
college also known as King's Hall
(which later became part of Trinity College
), the college steward was too ill to face him. Two students there, John and Alan, originally from Strother in North East England
, are very outraged at this latest theft and vow to beat the miller at his own game. John and Alan pack an even larger amount of wheat
than usual and say they will watch Simpkin while he grinds it into flour
, pretending that they are interested in the process because they have limited knowledge about milling. Simpkin sees through the clerks' story and vows to take even more of their grain than he had planned, to prove that scholars are not always the wisest or cleverest of people. He unties their horse
, and the two students are unable to catch it until nightfall. Meanwhile, the miller steals the clerks' flour and gives it to his wife to bake a loaf of bread.
Returning to the Miller's house, John and Alan offer to pay him for a night's sleeping there. He challenges them to make his single bedroom into a grand house. After much rearranging, Simpkin and his wife sleep in one bed, John and Alan in another, and Malyne in the third. The baby boy's cradle sits at the foot of the miller's bed.
After a long night of drinking wine
, Sipmkin and his family fall fast asleep while John and Alan lie awake, plotting revenge. First Alan gets up and quietly approaches Malyne in her bed so as not to startle her and make her cry out, and rapes her. When the miller's wife leaves her bed to relieve herself of the wine she's drunk, John moves the baby's cradle to the foot of his own bed. Upon returning, the miller's wife feels for the cradle in order to identify her bed, and mistakenly assumes that John's bed is her own. When she enters his bed, John leaps upon her and begins raping her.
Dawn comes, and Alan says goodbye to Malyne, whom he'd raped three times during the night. She tells Alan to look behind the main door to find the bread she had helped make with the flour her father had stolen. Seeing the cradle in front of what he assumes is Simpkin's bed (but is in fact John's), he goes to the other bed, shakes the miller —whom he thought was John—awake and recounts that he'd just slept with Malyne. Symkyn rises from his bed in a rage, waking his wife in John's bed, who takes a club and hits her raging husband by mistake, thinking him one of the students. John and Alan flee without paying for their food and lodgings, taking with them the bread and horse. The Reeve goes on to say that the Miller was well beaten not having been paid for the lodging, food or his services. The Reeve is believed to have trained at Trumpington College, Cambridge, a specialist college for such professions.
More broadly, this type of tale is known as a "cradle-trick" tale, where the wife gets into the wrong bed because the cradle has been moved. These tales were popular all over Europe in the Middle Ages. One such story is the 13th-century French Le meunier et les II clers. In this tale, the clerks do not know the miller, but are new in town looking for jobs as bakers. The miller has his wife send them into the woods looking for him while he steals their goods. They come back and end up spending a night with the family, and find that the miller's daughter spends every night locked in a bin in order to protect her chastity. During the night, the miller's wife has sex with one of the clerks in exchange for a ring which will restore her virginity. She then gives the clerk the key to her daughter's bin and invites him to have sex with her. The miller later finds out and accuses his wife, only to have her reveal that he is a robber. Other "cradle-trick" tales include the French De Gombert et des deux clers, a Flemish tale: Ein bispel van ij clerken, and two German tales: Das Studentenabenteuer and Irregang und Girregar.
or dawn-song, where two lovers express their sorrow at parting in the morning after a night together. Chaucer himself used aube elsewhere, for example in his Troilus and Criseyde
. This type of love poem was usually written in a very high, courtly style and the characters in them were usually knights and ladies, but in this tale Chaucer brings it down to the level of a fabliau, which gives it a strong satire. For example, Alein, instead of saying to Malyne, "I am thy own knight", says "I is thyn owen clerk" (emph. added), and Malyne, between emotional words of parting, tells Alein about a bread in the mill—an odd fixture in any love poem. (This may be a slang term for pregnancy, similar to the modern "bun in the oven," a further humiliation to the Miller.).
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...
's The Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the 14th century. The tales are told as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at...
. The reeve
Reeve (England)
Originally in Anglo-Saxon England the reeve was a senior official with local responsibilities under the Crown e.g. as the chief magistrate of a town or district...
, named Oswald in the text, is the manager of a large estate who reaped incredible profits for his master and himself. He is described in the Tales as skinny and bad-tempered. The Reeve had once been a carpenter
Carpenter
A carpenter is a skilled craftsperson who works with timber to construct, install and maintain buildings, furniture, and other objects. The work, known as carpentry, may involve manual labor and work outdoors....
, a profession mocked in the previous Miller's Tale
The Miller's Prologue and Tale
"The Miller's Tale" is the second of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales , told by the drunken miller Robyn to "quite" "The Knight's Tale"....
. Oswald responds with a tale that mocks the Miller's profession.
The tale is based on a popular fabliau
Fabliau
A fabliau is a comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France between ca. 1150 and 1400. They are generally characterized by an excessiveness of sexual and scatological obscenity. Several of them were reworked by Giovanni Boccaccio for the Decamerone and by Geoffrey Chaucer...
(also the source of the Sixth Story of the Ninth Day of The Decameron
The Decameron
The Decameron, also called Prince Galehaut is a 14th-century medieval allegory by Giovanni Boccaccio, told as a frame story encompassing 100 tales by ten young people....
) of the period with many different versions, the "cradle-trick." Chaucer improves on his sources with his detailed characterization and sly humour linking the act of grinding corn with sex. The northeastern accent of the two clerks is also the earliest surviving attempt in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
to record a dialect from an area other than that of the main writer. Chaucer's works are written with traces of the southern English or London accent of himself and his scribes, but he extracts comedy from imitating accents, a comedic device
Comedic device
A comedic device is used in comedy to write humor in a common structure. They can become so common that they are difficult for writers to use without being perceived as cheesy.-Double entendre:...
that is still popular today.
Summary
SimonSimon
Simon is a common name, from Hebrew meaning "He who has heard/hears [the word of God]".Simon may also refer to:-Names:* Simon , including a list of people with the given name Simon...
is a miller
Miller
A miller usually refers to a person who operates a mill, a machine to grind a cereal crop to make flour. Milling is among the oldest of human occupations. "Miller", "Milne" and other variants are common surnames, as are their equivalents in other languages around the world...
who lives in Trumpington
Trumpington, Cambridgeshire
Trumpington is a village within the city of Cambridge, UK, of which it is a suburb. It is located on the south-west side of the city and borders Cherry Hinton to the east, Grantchester to the west and Great Shelford and Little Shelford to the south-east....
near Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
and who steals wheat
Wheat
Wheat is a cereal grain, originally from the Levant region of the Near East, but now cultivated worldwide. In 2007 world production of wheat was 607 million tons, making it the third most-produced cereal after maize and rice...
and meal
Meal
A meal is an instance of eating, specifically one that takes place at a specific time and includes specific, prepared food.Meals occur primarily at homes, restaurants, and cafeterias, but may occur anywhere. Regular meals occur on a daily basis, typically several times a day...
brought to him for grinding. Simpkin is also a bully and expert with knives (q.v. the coulter
Coulter
- People :* Allen Coulter, American director* Ann Coulter, American author and conservative political commentator* Ashley Coulter, Canadian singer* Catherine Coulter, American novelist* E. Merton Coulter, American historian* Joey Coulter, race car driver...
in the Miller's Tale). His wife is the portly daughter of the town clergyman
Pastor
The word pastor usually refers to an ordained leader of a Christian congregation. When used as an ecclesiastical styling or title, this role may be abbreviated to "Pr." or often "Ps"....
(and therefore illegitimate, as Catholic
Catholic
The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...
priests do not marry). They have a twenty-year-old daughter Malyne and a six-month-old son.
When Simpkin overcharged for his latest work grinding corn for Soler Hall, a Cambridge University
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
college also known as King's Hall
King's Hall, Cambridge
King's Hall was once one of the constituent colleges of Cambridge, founded in 1317, the second after Peterhouse. King's Hall was established by King Edward II to provide chancery clerks for his administration, and was very rich compared to Michaelhouse, which occupied the southern area of what is...
(which later became part of Trinity College
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...
), the college steward was too ill to face him. Two students there, John and Alan, originally from Strother in North East England
North East England
North East England is one of the nine official regions of England. It covers Northumberland, County Durham, Tyne and Wear, and Teesside . The only cities in the region are Durham, Newcastle upon Tyne and Sunderland...
, are very outraged at this latest theft and vow to beat the miller at his own game. John and Alan pack an even larger amount of wheat
Wheat
Wheat is a cereal grain, originally from the Levant region of the Near East, but now cultivated worldwide. In 2007 world production of wheat was 607 million tons, making it the third most-produced cereal after maize and rice...
than usual and say they will watch Simpkin while he grinds it into flour
Flour
Flour is a powder which is made by grinding cereal grains, other seeds or roots . It is the main ingredient of bread, which is a staple food for many cultures, making the availability of adequate supplies of flour a major economic and political issue at various times throughout history...
, pretending that they are interested in the process because they have limited knowledge about milling. Simpkin sees through the clerks' story and vows to take even more of their grain than he had planned, to prove that scholars are not always the wisest or cleverest of people. He unties their horse
Horse
The horse is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus, or the wild horse. It is a single-hooved mammal belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature into the large, single-toed animal of today...
, and the two students are unable to catch it until nightfall. Meanwhile, the miller steals the clerks' flour and gives it to his wife to bake a loaf of bread.
Returning to the Miller's house, John and Alan offer to pay him for a night's sleeping there. He challenges them to make his single bedroom into a grand house. After much rearranging, Simpkin and his wife sleep in one bed, John and Alan in another, and Malyne in the third. The baby boy's cradle sits at the foot of the miller's bed.
After a long night of drinking wine
Wine
Wine is an alcoholic beverage, made of fermented fruit juice, usually from grapes. The natural chemical balance of grapes lets them ferment without the addition of sugars, acids, enzymes, or other nutrients. Grape wine is produced by fermenting crushed grapes using various types of yeast. Yeast...
, Sipmkin and his family fall fast asleep while John and Alan lie awake, plotting revenge. First Alan gets up and quietly approaches Malyne in her bed so as not to startle her and make her cry out, and rapes her. When the miller's wife leaves her bed to relieve herself of the wine she's drunk, John moves the baby's cradle to the foot of his own bed. Upon returning, the miller's wife feels for the cradle in order to identify her bed, and mistakenly assumes that John's bed is her own. When she enters his bed, John leaps upon her and begins raping her.
Dawn comes, and Alan says goodbye to Malyne, whom he'd raped three times during the night. She tells Alan to look behind the main door to find the bread she had helped make with the flour her father had stolen. Seeing the cradle in front of what he assumes is Simpkin's bed (but is in fact John's), he goes to the other bed, shakes the miller —whom he thought was John—awake and recounts that he'd just slept with Malyne. Symkyn rises from his bed in a rage, waking his wife in John's bed, who takes a club and hits her raging husband by mistake, thinking him one of the students. John and Alan flee without paying for their food and lodgings, taking with them the bread and horse. The Reeve goes on to say that the Miller was well beaten not having been paid for the lodging, food or his services. The Reeve is believed to have trained at Trumpington College, Cambridge, a specialist college for such professions.
Source
Although scholars are reluctant to say that Chaucer ever read the Decameron, Chaucer's story is very close to one told in Day IX, Tale 6 of that set of Italian tales, in which two clerks lodge with a innkeeper for the night. One of the clerks, who has long been an admirer of the innkeeper's daughter, slips into her bed while she is asleep and, after her fears are overcome, they both enjoy sex together. Later, a cat wakes up the innkeeper's wife and she gets up to investigate. The second clerk gets up to go to the bathroom and moves the cradle in front of the innkeeper's bed because it is in the way. After he returns to his bed, the innkeeper's wife returns and feels her way to the bed with the cradle in front of it, which is actually the clerk's bed. She slips in beside him and both are surprised and have sex together. The wife later explains to the suspecting innkeeper that she was in her daughter's bed all night. The story has several differences from Chaucer's in that the clerks do not plot against the innkeeper but are only there to get to his daughter. No mill is even mentioned in the story.More broadly, this type of tale is known as a "cradle-trick" tale, where the wife gets into the wrong bed because the cradle has been moved. These tales were popular all over Europe in the Middle Ages. One such story is the 13th-century French Le meunier et les II clers. In this tale, the clerks do not know the miller, but are new in town looking for jobs as bakers. The miller has his wife send them into the woods looking for him while he steals their goods. They come back and end up spending a night with the family, and find that the miller's daughter spends every night locked in a bin in order to protect her chastity. During the night, the miller's wife has sex with one of the clerks in exchange for a ring which will restore her virginity. She then gives the clerk the key to her daughter's bin and invites him to have sex with her. The miller later finds out and accuses his wife, only to have her reveal that he is a robber. Other "cradle-trick" tales include the French De Gombert et des deux clers, a Flemish tale: Ein bispel van ij clerken, and two German tales: Das Studentenabenteuer and Irregang und Girregar.
Malyne—"wenche" or rape victim?
Malyne's nose is described as "camus" which people at the time thought indicated eagerness for love. Although she is surprised at the beginning, by the end of the night she seems to be in love with Alan, calling him her "lemman", telling him where the cake is hidden, and that her father stole his flour. Her parallel in the Decameron also finds the night enjoyable after some initial fear and is eager for future meetings with the clerk. Malyne is also described as a "wenche" which usually means "immoral" or "wanton" woman, but can also mean merely "a poor woman". Still, the description of how the clerk Alein stalks up to her bed so she won't cry out has caused scholars to question whether she is indeed a willing sexual partner whether the scene might more accurately be called a rape. Since Chaucer does not describe Malyne's feelings, it is difficult to know for sure.Satiric aube
As morning approaches, Alein and Malyne have an exchange of feelings which scholars have described as a mock aubeAlba (poetry)
The alba is a subgenre of Occitan lyric poetry. It describes the longing of lovers who, having passed a night together, must separate for fear of being discovered by their respective spouses....
or dawn-song, where two lovers express their sorrow at parting in the morning after a night together. Chaucer himself used aube elsewhere, for example in his Troilus and Criseyde
Troilus and Criseyde
Troilus and Criseyde is a poem by Geoffrey Chaucer which re-tells in Middle English the tragic story of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde set against a backdrop of war in the Siege of Troy. It was composed using rime royale and probably completed during the mid 1380s. Many Chaucer scholars regard it...
. This type of love poem was usually written in a very high, courtly style and the characters in them were usually knights and ladies, but in this tale Chaucer brings it down to the level of a fabliau, which gives it a strong satire. For example, Alein, instead of saying to Malyne, "I am thy own knight", says "I is thyn owen clerk" (emph. added), and Malyne, between emotional words of parting, tells Alein about a bread in the mill—an odd fixture in any love poem. (This may be a slang term for pregnancy, similar to the modern "bun in the oven," a further humiliation to the Miller.).