The Summoner’s Tale is the most scatological of
CHAUCER’s CANTERBURY TALES. Fittingly attributed to
the pilgrim Summoner, the most physically disgusting
of the pilgrims described in the GENERAL PROLOGUE,
the Summoner’s Tale is presented as the
Summoner’s revenge on the pilgrim Friar, who has
just told a tale critical of Summoners (officers
whose job was to summon offenders to ecclesiastical
courts). The tale has no known analogues and
was probably Chaucer’s own invention. Because of
its contemporary setting, bourgeois characters, and
comic emphasis on trickery, the tale has often been
called a FABLIAU, but it lacks the focus on sexual escapades
generally characteristic of that genre.
Chiefly the tale is a satire of the greed and hypocrisy
of friars.
The tale begins with an anecdote in which a
friar, visiting hell, is shown the final resting place
of all friars in Satan’s hindquarters—a perversion
of a popular tale in which the Virgin reveals the
heavenly home of friars to be under her protective
skirts. Then begins the tale proper, in which a Yorkshire
friar, begging from door to door, calls at the
household of the bedridden old Thomas, whose
wife tells the friar how bad-tempered her ill husband
is. The friar preaches an impromptu sermon
against anger, and then asks Thomas for a financial
contribution. Despite Thomas’s protestations that
he has given all he can, the friar continues pressing
him, until Thomas promises to give him a rich gift
if he will swear to share it equally among his 12
convent brothers. The friar agrees, and Thomas
tells him to reach down under his backside where
the treasure is hidden. When the friar does so,
Thomas farts in his hand.
The friar storms out of Thomas’s house and angrily
complains to the local lord. Rather than focus
on punishing Thomas, the lord becomes fascinated
with the arithmetic or “ars-metrike” problem of
how to divide the fart 12 ways. His squire suggests
that the 12 friars assemble around a cartwheel,
with their noses at the ends of the spokes. The
complaining friar may be in the center, at the hub
of the wheel. Thomas may then be invited to sit
on the hub of the wheel and break wind, so that
the fart will travel along the spokes of the wheel
and be distributed evenly to the waiting friars. The
squire is handsomely rewarded for his ingenuity,
and the friar is silenced.
Scholarly interest in the tale has often looked at
the characterization of the friar, who is the epitome
of con man, hypocrite, glutton, and false comforter.
He says he can’t eat a bite but orders a gourmet
meal; he was absent when the couple’s child died but
claims to have had a vision of him in heaven; and
he condemns the very sin he is most guilty of himself.
Biblical and iconographic allusions have also
interested scholars, particularly the image of the
wheel and its relation to Pentecost, as well as allusions
to the Abraham story and other biblical
events. These elements suggest a serious satirical intent
for the tale, despite its surface coarseness.
Bibliography
Fleming, John V. “Anticlerical Satire as Theological
Essay: Chaucer’s ‘Summoner’s Tale,’ ” Thalia 6, no.
1 (1983): 5–22.
Olsen, Glending. “The End of The Summoner’s Tale
and the Uses of Pentecost,” Studies in the Age of
Chaucer 21 (1999): 209–245.
Ruud, Jay. “ ‘My Spirit Hath His Fostering in the
Bible’: The Summoner’s Tale and the Holy Spirit,”
in Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in The
Canterbury Tales, edited by Susanna Greer Fein,
David Raybin, and Peter C. Braeger. Studies in
Medieval Culture, 29.Kalamazoo,Mich.:Medieval
Institute Publications, 1991, 125–148.