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Chaucer's Pardoner and the Three Estates

If you've had a Chaucer course, and have read the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and the Knight's Tale and/or the Pardoner's Tale, read on. If you have not, this link won't be much help to you. It talks about the Knight, his tale, and the young knights in it.

In the Knight's Tale, a young knight called Arcite, accompanied by a squire "disguised povrely as he was" (a squire being the knight's helper, a young man in training to be a knight), has been expelled from Athens, where, as a prisoner of war, he fell in love with his captor's neice, Emily. But Arcite, in disguise, returns to Athens to carry water, chop wood, and rise in the Athenian court to be near his beloved Emily. The knight has to change his class appearance in order to become a lover.

In another of the tales, the Pardoner's Tale, the discussion of rank takes the form of the "trifunctional" model of medieval estates: those who rule, those who work, and those who pray.

Here Chaucer seems to represent the three estates indirectly rather than directly. In the Pardoner's Tale it seems that the model is present in inverted form. The negative image of the trifunctional model asserts the interdependence of the three orders in the trio of tavern sins that the Pardoner both denounces and practices: gambling, gluttony, and swearing. The need for rule is mocked by gambling, which is play based on chance and misrule. The need to work is mocked by gluttons who consume but do not produce. And the need for prayer is mocked by those who swear. Such oaths as "Goddes armes" (VI.692), a pun on God's two arms and on His "arms" (weapons), express rebellion against prayer in a war of wills: rather than submit to God's will, the three men do verbal violence to his person.

• How might his complicity in these sins be responsible for the way the Pardoner is treated at the end of the tale? How have critics addressed the issue of his social standing among the Canterbury Pilgrims and in particular the clergy among them? You can get some help from:

Carolyn Dinshaw. Chaucer's Sexual Poetics . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. (on reserve)

Dinshaw will lead you to additional bibliography. There are many books about Chaucer on permanent reserve in the Cole Room at the Library. Here we quote Chaucer from Larry D. Benson, ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 44-45.

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