The Summoner's Tale

The Summoner's Tale is one of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

The tale is a fierce counterpunch to the preceding tale by The Friar which had been an offensive attack on summoners. Summoners were officials in ecclesiastical courts 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.

There are in fact several tales which the Summoner tells and all of them directed at friars. 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:

'A pious preist, 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.'

Jill Mann, The Canterbury Tales: Notes to the Summoner's Tale, (London: Penguin, 2005).

The bawdy story the Summoner tells in his prologue seems to be an inversion of Caesarius of Heisterbach's story Dialogus miraculorum. In the Heisterbach's story he 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:

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.

The main tale of the Summoner's is about a mendicant friar who travels about preaching and gaining his living by begging. It tells at first how the friar begs for alms 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 Harry Bailey, 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 meagre 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. He tells him how important it is to share wealth and he emphasises 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 spreading his charity around like this and tells him three short parables warning of the dangers of ire. The sick man then says he has one gift he can give and that it is hidden down at the base of his back. The friar puts his hand there and the sick man lets out a fart.

Leaving in disgust the friar goes straight to the house of the local landowner and tells him and his wife what has happened. The landowner does not seem very shocked and instead is more worried how the gift could be divided between all thirteen friars of the order. When the lord's squire suggests an ingenious solution to the problem involving a cartwheel, the lord is so impressed that he gives the squire a new coat.

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.

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.

External links

• Read "The Summoner's Tale" with interlinear translation