The Summoner's Prologue and Tale
Encyclopedia
The Summoner's Tale is one of 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...

by Geoffrey Chaucer
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...

.

The tale is a fierce counterpunch to the preceding tale by The Friar which had been an offensive attack on summoners
Summons
Legally, a summons is a legal document issued by a court or by an administrative agency of government for various purposes.-Judicial summons:...

. Summoners were officials in ecclesiastical court
Ecclesiastical court
An ecclesiastical court is any of certain courts having jurisdiction mainly in spiritual or religious matters. In the Middle Ages in many areas of Europe these courts had much wider powers than before the development of nation states...

s who summoned people to attend and worked in a similar way to ushers. The Friar had accused them of corruption and taking bribes and the Summoner seeks redress through his own story.

Sources

There are in fact several tales which the Summoner tells and all of them directed at friar
Friar
A friar is a member of one of the mendicant orders.-Friars and monks:...

s. The main tale of a grasping friar seems to contain many original elements composed by Chaucer but Jill Mann suggests that it is based on 'The Tale of the Priest's Bladder', a French thirteenth-century 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...

:

'A pious priest, when on his deathbed, is urged by two Jacobin friars to revoke some of the charitable bequests he has already made, so that he may give something to their order. The priest promises to give them a precious jewel, which turns out to be his bladder.'

The bawdy story the Summoner tells in his prologue
Prologue
A prologue is an opening to a story that establishes the setting and gives background details, often some earlier story that ties into the main one, and other miscellaneous information. The Greek prologos included the modern meaning of prologue, but was of wider significance...

 seems to be an inversion of a story in Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum. In Heisterbach's story, a monk ascends to heaven and finds his fellow Cistercians living under the cloak of the Virgin Mary. In the Summoner's version the friar descends into hell and not seeing any other friars believes they are all such goodly men, but the angel who accompanies him says to Satan
Satan
Satan , "the opposer", is the title of various entities, both human and divine, who challenge the faith of humans in the Hebrew Bible...

:
Hold up thy tayl, thou Sathanas!' quod he;
`Shewe forth thyn ers, and lat the frere se
Where is the nest of freres in this place!'


With that the freres (friars) fly out Satan's ers (arse), swarm about the room and disappear back up his ers.

Plot summary

The main tale of the Summoner is about a Mendicant
Mendicant
The term mendicant refers to begging or relying on charitable donations, and is most widely used for religious followers or ascetics who rely exclusively on charity to survive....

 friar who travels about preaching and gaining his living by begging. It tells at first how the friar begs for alms
Alms
Alms or almsgiving is a religious rite which, in general, involves giving materially to another as an act of religious virtue.It exists in a number of religions. In Philippine Regions, alms are given as charity to benefit the poor. In Buddhism, alms are given by lay people to monks and nuns to...

 and that he records the names of the people who give him charity so he can pray for them later. It then says that he erases the names as soon as he has left the house. This prompts the Friar from the pilgrimage, listening to the tale, to interrupt angrily just as the Summoner had interrupted his tale earlier. After the host calls for peace, the Summoner continues his tale.

The friar in the tale then goes to a sick man's house. He does not beg for some meager fare to sustain him, but instead demands a roasted pig's head. The friar asks the sick man for money to help his order build its cloister
Cloister
A cloister is a rectangular open space surrounded by covered walks or open galleries, with open arcades on the inner side, running along the walls of buildings and forming a quadrangle or garth...

. He tells him how important it is to share wealth and he emphasizes how important friars are to society saying:
And if yow lakke oure predicacioun, (preaching)
Thanne goth the world al to destruccioun.


The sick man says angrily that he has given much to many friars over the years and he is still sick. The friar reprimands him for such sentiments and tells him three parables warning of the dangers of ire. The sick man then says he has one gift he can give which must be equally shared among the friars and that he is sitting on it to keep it safe. The friar puts his hand in the cleft of the man's buttocks and the sick man lets out an enormous fart.

Leaving in rage and disgust the friar goes straight to the house of the local lord and tells him and his wife what has happened. The lord does not seem very sympathetic to the friar and instead muses on how the gift could be divided among all thirteen friars of the order. When the lord's squire
Squire
The English word squire is a shortened version of the word Esquire, from the Old French , itself derived from the Late Latin , in medieval or Old English a scutifer. The Classical Latin equivalent was , "arms bearer"...

 suggests having the monks stand around a cartwheel on a still day and letting someone fart in the centre, the lord is so impressed that he gives the squire a new coat.

Analysis

The Summoner uses the tale to satirise friars in general, with their long sermonising and their tendency to live well despite vows of poverty. It reflects on the theme of clerical corruption, a common one within The Canterbury Tales and within the wider 14th century world as seen by the lollard movement. The attitude of the lord implies that he is as unimpressed as any layman with the friars.

Neither the Summoner's nor The Friar's Tale leave either of them looking particularly good. After the Friar's tale the Summoner does not use his own tale to defend summoners but rather he replies with his own attack. The short stories warning about ire within his main story are possibly a comment on the unheeded anger between both of them.

He is described as being lecherous with his red face disfigured with boils and -- like the Miller and the Cook -- quite drunk.

External links

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