With the Friar's Tale, however, we get an example of another genre Chaucer uses in the Canterbury Tales: an exemplary tale that is shrouded in the guise of a fabliau.
The friar borrows from the previous pilgrims by setting up his tale initially as a fabliau, a narrative about a summoner who is a "rennere up and doun / With mandementz for fornicacioun / and is ybet at every townes ende" (1283-5). Like the "quiting" among the miller's, reeve's and cook's tales, the friar is participating in an insulting contest with the summoner and the reader anticipates a tale of trickery in which the summoner will come out the worse. The tale is actually structured very much like a fabliau, and the summoner is tricked into being sent to hell by the devil.
Additionally, as Helen Cooper explains in her Oxford Guide to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, fabliaux often use commonplace, domestic or subhuman imagery, such as animals, rather than the romance genre's use of religious or exotic imagery (24). The Friar uses animal imagery to enhance the appearance of a fabliau, comparing the summoner to a dog: "For in this world nys dogge for the bowe / That kan a hurt deer from an hool yknowe / Bet than this sumnour knew a sly lecchour" (1369-1371).
Behind its guise of fabliau, however, the Friar's tale is actually an exemplary tale. While irreverent, like the preceding fabliaux, the exemplary tale unlike a fabliau does not ignore "the operations of God" in favor of the more base and earthly (Cooper 20), but bears within its structure a moral warning against greed. The summoner is so blinded by his greed and desire to bribe a poor widow that he makes a deal with the devil and does not understand at first the trap he has walked into until it is too late. The friar warns his audience to beware the devil, to "disposeth ay youre hertes to withstonde / The feend, that you wolde make thral and bonde" (1659-1660). He even bluntly warns the summoner to repent "of hir mysdedes, er that the feend hem hente!" (1664).
It perhaps should come as little surprise that our first religious figure in the Canterbury Tales gives us not a fabliau, but an exemplary tale involving the devil and warning against a moral transgression. The most interesting part of this tale, to me, is Chaucer's blending of fabliau and exemplary tale into a hybrid of sorts that seems to move the friar from his lofty first-estate standing closer to the level of the commoners who have already told their tales. The friar stoops to mixing characteristics of the earthier fabliau into his exemplary tale, but is this unconscious or an intentional act in an effort to better convey his point about summoners to the other pilgrims? Is this hybridization a wise choice, considering his audience? Is it more effective than a simple exemplary tale?
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Your observations about the fabliau element in the Friar's Tale, and your concluding questions about the rationale and wisdom of this hybridization, are even more interesting considering the depiction of the Friar in the General Prologue. For this otherwise social-climbing, rather dandyish, "curteis" figure, who "kan / So muchel of daliaunce and fair langage" (I.210-211), to leaven his anti-summoner sermon with a dash of fabliau seems especially striking. If, like me, you see the Summoner as the victor in their contest (and he does seem to be, starting with his brilliant one-upping of the Friar's "all summoners go to hell" message), his ability to entice the Friar on to this dodgy territory might be the first step in his success. Provoking the elegantly lisping Friar into setting aside his "fair langage" for such an earthy and nasty story prepares the ground for the far more thorough revelation of fraternal pretension and hypocrisy in the Summoner's Tale; we are fully inclined to accept the portrayal of Friar John after seeing the hypocritical Friar Hubert reveal his own true, fabliau-tinged colors.
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