The Envoy of the Clerk's Tale: A Farewell to Arms

I can't get over that envoy to the Clerk's Tale, which vaulted an already sophisticated and fascinating story into some transcendent level of narrative art. The tale of Griselda is a masterpiece: gripping in its own right and replete with the rich political significance and allegorical symbolism that we discussed on Monday (and that themselves, in their Boccaccian and Petrarchan manifestations, point in different directions, both of which Chaucer nonetheless manages to render simultaneously plausible in his telling). To conclude such an absorbing, shocking, infuriating story with such a boisterous and satiric coda, one that almost seems to undermine everything that precedes it, is a stroke of genius - and like all real strokes of genius, it more or less defies interpretation.

The opening lines of the envoy would be astonishing enough by themselves: "Griselde is deed and eek hire pacience, / And bothe atones buryed in Ytaille" (1177-1178). In the way in which it unceremoniously shoves our sentimental, sympathetic heroine under the ground, this beginning is almost ruthless. Beyond its brusque disposal of the story's protagonist, the envoy also disposes of the exemplary/allegorical significance and didactic force that the Clerk, following Petrarch, has only recently broached. Granted, the Clerk specifically disclaims only a reading of his tale that would make it a model for matrimonial behavior, but the envoy is so insistently playful, with its show-off rhyme scheme and increasingly comic or extravagant images, that not just this specific didactic meaning but all exemplary or allegorical readings (the very idea of exemplum?) come to seem ridiculous. "[L]at us stynte of ernestful matere," indeed (1175).

Which is not to say that the envoy doesn't make a serious point, just that this point isn't something simplistic and edifying (on the order of "wives should endure their husbands' authority as patiently as Griselda, or even "all human beings should endure the inscrutable acts of God as patiently as Griselda"). The envoy begins with a relatively straightforward warning against confusing life and literature, or directly translating literature to life (an important warning for some on the pilgrimage: witness the Reeve). It warns also, and at the same time, against the unbridled exercise of masculine authority in marriage, another relatively straightforward and unambiguous injunction. But from here, as the same rhymes repeat again and again, giving the little poem an increasingly comic and artificial air, things get steadily less serious. The legitimate admonition to married men (and political leaders?) to not act like Walter becomes a call for women to rhetorically defend themselves against misogynist "auctoritee," to talk back and wield "governaille" (1190), and finally to wage metaphorical warfare against their husbands and reduce them to misery. Round about the entry of the cow Chichevache (1188), this has all become visibly tongue-in-cheek, and by the time we get to the overblown depiction of marriage as a Hundred Years' War battle, with wives piercing husbands with "[t]he arwes of thy crabbed eloquence" like longbowmen mowing down knights at Crecy or Poitiers (1203), its burlesque qualities are patent. 

That the Clerk doesn't seriously make a case for women running marriages and hectoring the life out of their husbands is not a surprise. But I don't think the comic absurdity of these stanzas has the effect of putting women back in their place, either. These absurd images of warfare between wives and husbands instead point to the absurdity of seeing matrimony as warfare - maybe even the absurdity of strife between two people who should, in the eyes of God and men, be one flesh (something that various speakers in the Merchant's Tale will reiterate). As Jason points out in his recent post, Chaucer has gradually been developing a picture of the reciprocity necessary to marriage. In The Wife of Bath's and Clerk's tales, both parties must negotiate their positions, modify their behavior, or at least prove their worthiness. The best marriages (the Wife of Bath's with Jankyn after its crisis, for example) are founded on some sense of cooperation and equality. Through and beneath its satirical scenes of matrimonial warfare and male misery, I think the Clerk's envoy makes a similar point. Differences in power, age, temperament, or other factors that might lead to such opposition and conflict have no place in marriage and must be reciprocally worked out should they arise. 

And by making this point by wildly exaggerating it, the Clerk also follows the model of the Wife of Bath, who, as I see it, cloaked a similar plea - for reciprocity, parity, and harmony in marriage - in a similarly boisterous, comic, deliberately overstated manner (at times, anyway). So in claiming that he speaks "for the Wyves love of Bathe" (1170) when he satirizes her demand for female governance in marriage (a demand that I don't think was entirely serious even in her articulation of it), the Clerk speaks the plain truth. I think he does in fact honor Alison of Bath by making a similar point in a similar style.  

The Worthy Wyf

Based on class discussion concerning both “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Clerk’s Tale”, I have been forming some thoughts on the limited powers afforded to women in the context of The Canterbury Tales as a whole.
In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” chivalry is used by female characters as a tool to manipulate men. Though in some respects the old woman who marries the knight is ultimately forced to conform to his standards and contemporary norms to form a happy marriage, she does manage to use the mode of the knightly quest to secure for herself a noble husband. While he gets what he wants in terms of a beautiful and faithful wife, she also gets what she (presumably) wants in the way of a noble, courageous, and courteous husband. In this manner, the chivalric ideal of duty not only brings the two together, it places the knight in a position where the task of maintaining her as a wife becomes not only dutiful, but desirable. Though the tale is told by a woman, it is certainly possible that Chaucer is simply using the Wife of Bath as a mouthpiece to express not necessarily what women want, but what they deserve within the context of a conventional medieval social structure. Women should not expect a husband like the knight unless they first meet “knightly” standards. Just because the old woman is able to use chivalry in a subversive way to entrap the knight in a marriage, does not mean she will not have to give ground in order for the marriage to be happy.
In “The Clerk’s Tale” we also see the same idea in practice. By entering into a marriage with a man above her social status, Griselda is achieving a sort of ideal, but not without consequences. She must also prove her worthiness by remaining constant and patient through the trials inflicted on her by Walter. Though Walter’s behavior may be decided less chivalrous than the knight’s, this tale still shows that a woman must meet certain criteria before her marriage can meet the needs of both her and her husband.
Based on the themes of these two tales, I think it can be safely stated that a woman’s primary mode of agency in The Canterbury Tales is the establishment of a proper role within established framework. If a woman can prove herself beautiful, loyal, and constant, she has far greater hope of establishing further authority than she would otherwise.

Genre and the Friar's Tale

In her blog post "Fabliau," Jennifer Levin explains the history and definition of a fabliau and points out Chaucer's use of the genre in several of his Tales. Fabliaux generally are narratives focusing on ordinary people, involve trickery and games, and cast the third estate in a negative light. 

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?

The Same Coin?

Why do the Friar and the Summoner tell each other's tales?
Obviously to expose the other's faults. The Friar tells a tale about a deceitful Summoner who extorts money from the innocent and the Summoner tells a tale about a deceitful Friar who takes money for prayers, which, it is implied is virtually the same thing just self-righteously executed. The Summoner preaches in his text and says of friars, "That specially oure sweete Lord Jhesus/Spak this by freres, whan he seyde thus/`Blessed be they that povere in spirit been.' He goes on to describe a Friar who is sent to assuage a sick man of his ire for the church and the Friar. Quickly we see the sick man thinks the Friar is a manipulative liar who uses people for his well being. And unfortunately for the Friar, the other lord he visits to seek some kind of revenge on the sick man also thinks he is duplicitous or else he wouldn't mock him so openly in his house.

The Friar makes a point to tell the group that he would have told them tales of the saints which would have made their hearts wrench with compassion and awe of their committment (something like that) but - we assume - he thought it best to put the fear of god into them rather than the love of god. Does this prove the Summoner's point that the Friar is "povere in spirit been"? The interplay of the two characters and their tales show shared traits which manifest differently, perhaps more violently in one (Summoner) and more insidiously in the other (Friar).

Knights, Hags and Gender Role Reversal

After Monday's class, it was interesting to see that there was a lengthy discussion regarding who benefited and who sacrificed at the end of the Wife of Bath's Tale. Though the overall consensus of the discussion was that the only true "loser" throughout the tale was the woman raped by the knight at the beginning, I believe that the true defeat came in a complete distruction of stereotypical gender roles in medieval society. Chaucer successfuly flipped the power roles between genders, and showed a world opposite to the one he was living in.

Obviously, it is clear that throughout the tale the women are in control. The knight (A knight of King Arthur, nonetheless), shatters the masculine, honorable mold that he is assigned and rapes a woman. As a result, he is placed on trial and it seems he is guaranteed execution for disgracing the role of the knight in King Arthur's kingdom. However, in what is an uncommon move, Arthur succumbs to his wife and allows her to decide the punishment for one of Arthur's knights. Thus, the Queen sends the knight on his mission. What motivation does Arthur have to transfer control to his wife? I'm still unsure the answer to that question.

The tale progresses, and after no success on finding the answer to what women want the knight meets the "olde wyf". After doing some research, I've learned that this knight meets hag situation has appeared numerous times in medieval literature*. According to Susan Carter, a knights have had to hook up with hideous women a couple of times in order to be victorious. It's kind of like slaying a dragon, except the dragon is a seriously busted lady.

The knight is generally rewared in a way that returns him to the prestigious level of a knight, but Chaucer's tale varies in that at the end of the tale, the knight has surrendered his will and his body to a woman. Whether she's ugly or hot, and whether he's happy or not, the knight has relenquished all control to his lady. So to recap: in the universe created by the Wife of Bath, King Arthur lets his queen do the decision making, and a knight's primary duty is to his wife. Not only that, but Arthur and the knight seem pretty cool with this. Sure, the knight is a little apprehensive when his wife is gross, but when all is said and done, he couldn't be happier.

All the talk of who made the sacrifices in the Wife of Bath's Tale seems pretty futile. People changed and gave up certain aspects of their lives, but in the end everyone was better for it. Although I think that the Wife of Bath is saying a world ran by women is a better one, I don't think Chaucer thinks so as well. I believe he was just posing an alternate control of power between genders. To me, it doesn't seem like the Wife of Bath's world is any better or worse than the accepted norm; it's just different.

* Carter, Suan. "Coupling the Beastly Bride and the Hunted Hunter". The Chaucer Review 37.4 (2003): 329-345.

"My Nacioun": The Man of Law and the Wife of Bath Write British History

I proposed in my last posting that the narrative trajectory of Fragment I of the Canterbury Tales might be seen as one of increasing nationalization, moving from the globalized, perennially expatriated Knight and his temporally and geographically remote tale to the rooted, here-and-now Englishness of that inimitable trio, the Miller, Reeve, and Cook. The nature and value of this newfound "Englishness" then became the question. Especially given the terms of their opposition with the Knight, it's easy to think of these tellers and their tales as embodying an authentic and unadulterated English identity, the mass popular identity of the third estate as against the internationalized francophone nobility and Latinate clergy. The abrupt termination of the Cook's Tale, however, suggests that such authentic and unadulterated Englishness, if it does exist, is a narrative dead end. The identity presupposed by the Cook's account of "oure citee" (I.4365) can't be sustained - at least not without a better sense of its historical underpinnings. This - an understanding of where the English nation came from and how it gained its current form, as a way of confirming its authenticity in the present - is one of the tasks undertaken in Fragments II and III.

Among (many other) things, both the Man of Law's and the Wife of Bath's tales are explorations of the national and pre-national past. In a way, they synthesize the two kinds of scene-setting in Fragment I, combining English places (for at least a significant part of their action) with distant times. In both stories, though, returning to these distant times troubles and undermines the Englishness of those English places. The hopeful, eternalizing "Whilom" that begins the Miller's and Cook's tales, the comfortable assumption that Oxford or "oure citee," London (itself a Celtic name), were always familiar and folksy English places, even back in once-upon-a-time, becomes considerably less viable after the lawyer and Allison have had their say. 

In the Man of Law's Tale, the ancestral English, when first encountered, "[w]ere payens, and that contree everywhere" (534). That is, the origins of England lie in the "strange nacioun," "the Barbre nacioun" (268, 281), to which Custance fears to be sent and against whom (but also for whom) Chaucer's Knight spends his life fighting. "Northhumberlond" (508), at this point in time, is the equivalent of Syria. Not only are these English pagans, they are pagan conquerors, aggressive subjugators of a country not their own - and a Christian one at that. In one sense, this reminder of the pagan Anglo-Saxon conquest of Christian Britons helps recuperate the past evoked by the Man of Law from a completely alienating alterity: the ancestors of the English may have been pagans, but at least they came to a country that was already, and in a sense primordially and inherently, Christian. But even if pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain was already Christian, it was still British, not English. The glib claims of the Miller or the Cook to timeless possession of their narrative spaces come up cold against this fact. The Man of Law, whose familiarity with legal precedent as far back as William the Conqueror (I.323-324) suggests some investment in national continuity across history (but whose inability or unwillingness to go back further than the Norman Conquest also says something about his national identification), certainly wants to minimize this undermining of the national history as much as possible - hence his description of the divine providence and miraculous nature of Northumberland's conversion to Christianity. But the effect of his story is still to expose the inauthenticity of the contemporary national identity in a deep historical perspective.

The Wife of Bath's Tale demonstrates this inauthenticity even more dramatically. In her telling, "this land" was originally so different as to belong to another order of existence: "fulfild of fayerye" (859). The lusty but prosaic world of the third estate tales in Fragment I, wherein John the Carpenter's belief that Nicholas has been charmed by "elves and...wightes" (3479) is a measure of his stupidity, is of recent and artificial creation, product of a religious conquest/exorcism: "the grete charitee and prayeres / Of lymtours and othere hooly freres.... - This maketh that ther ben no fayeryes" (865-866, 872). The contrast between the mechanisms of conversion in Allison's story and those in the Man of Law's are striking: divinely ordained enlightenment channeled through the passive body of Custance vs. the active assertion of male and clerkly authority, linked structurally and thematically with rape (after the friars have completed their exorcism, no incubi remain to prey on women - except the friars themselves [880]; and the description of the fraternal exorcism leads directly into the description of the bachelor knight's rape). The idea that it took such a sustained and implicitly violent effort to make Britain Christian (the necessary precondition to making it the way it is at Chaucer's time) further undermines the authenticity and purity of that ultimate identity. If the effort of Christianizing was even necessary at all: during her wedding-bed sermon to her husband, the fairy woman refers to "[t]he hye God, on whom that we bileeve" (1178). "Fayerye" Britain, by this account, was Christian (or monotheist, or something) already, an idea that would make its male clerkly transformation into the world in which "ther ben no fayeryes" seem all the more coercive and illegitimate.

The havoc that the Wife of Bath's Tale wreaks with authorized ideas about insular history and national identity is underscored by the knight's horrified reaction to the prospect of marrying the "olde wyf": "Allas, that any of my nacioun / Sholde evere so foule disparaged be!" (1068-1069) "Nacioun," here, has a narrow sense of "family" (closer, etymologically, to the root meaning of "birthplace"), but, as the uses of the word in the Man of Law's Tale testify, it also had a Middle English sense very close to the modern meaning of "nation." Thus, while the knight is specifically revolted to have his high lineage associated with this ugly and low-born woman, he also (as the mouthpiece of late 14th century Englishmen) might be thought of as voicing dismay that his nation is "disparaged" by this revelation of alterity and inauthenticity in its past. The Wife of Bath, of course, is hardly advancing a sober theory of history in her tale, but her irreverent and destabilizing retelling of "th' olde dayes" (that comfortable "whilom" of the Miller and the Cook) speaks to her desire to re-imagine and reconstitute the English national community in the present. She inserts herself into the vision of "oure" country and identity promulgated by the Miller, Reeve, and Cook in part by re-imagining the past on which that vision was predicated.

Thus, building off of the steady nationalization of narrative that took place over the course of Fragment I, Fragments II and III explore the historical foundations and justifications of the nation that emerges, and find those foundations to be shallow and unsteady. The Man of Law tells a story of Northumberland's predestined and providential conversion in order to redeem this alterity of the national past and bring it in line with the present, but the Wife of Bath, with a very different view of authority and society, delights in rendering the insular past as different and unfamiliar as possible in order to undercut that authority and that society. 

The Surrender Of Maistrye in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

I love it… “Miss Independent”. I too want to talk about the inscrutable Wife. I’ve been researching women in medieval culture over the last few weeks and have come across the Wife often. A particularly interesting analysis of the Prologue and Tale can be found in chapter three of Jill Mann’s book Geoffrey Chaucer. This book was published as part of a series, Feminist Readings.
In this chapter, Mann discusses the scene at the end of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, “the surrender of maistrye”. This is the chapter in the book I found the most interesting. Mann approaches the surrender of the rapist and his transformation into a meek and obedient husband as a kind of feminine fairy tale, and yet also a representation of male subjugation to female power (87-88). These two points: that a rapist mystically allows his old and undesirable wife to dictate the future, and that the surrender of man is worthy of female daydreams can be said to characterize the Wife herself. Indeed, Mann notes that the tale “repeats on a larger scale the pattern of surrender and reconciliation which is traced in miniature at the end of her Prologue” (87).
Side note: perhaps this partially explains why Pasolini may have found the Prologue itself extremely adequate representation of the Wife and therefore omitted her Tale.
We mentioned many aspects of her character in class. She’s spunky and quick to explain away her faults, and yet finds no sin in any of (and even her most tricksy) actions. And as see upon reading her tale, I believe she can be heralded as an early feminist. She believes that the most important thing for a woman is the right to choose what she’ll do and where she’ll go. The surrender of maistyre represents the fantastical dreaming of a woman who wants nothing more than to take this maistyre and turn and wield it herself.


Mann, Jill. Geoffrey Chaucer. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, Inc.,
1991.

Miss Independent

We said a lot today in class about the Wife of Bath's prologue and her character but I think a little more interpretation would not be excessive.

It was established in class that Allison of Bath is sort of quite-ing herself in her prologue as means of protecting herself or lending a certain kind of validity to her story, but this doesn't seem to be true. She quites herself so as to hide herself and give an impression of honesty and humility (a "grounding" self-knowledge)but her gloss of herself is a false sheen covering a more ingrained and influential ambition from which she cannot divorce.

I've read in some of my research for the annotated bibliography that women - more often than men - in the 14th century were more apt to petition to save their marriage - even a bad one - because it was their only claim to security (even if her husband was poor) or social standing of any merit (even if her husband was lowly born). The courts in this era sided with the wives overwhelmingly perhaps because they didn't want a bunch of single women to further burden the state, I'm not sure on that point. The point I am trying to make is that Allison's virtue - if she had any - was in the nakedness of her ambition. She lived in a man's world but had a man's appetites and therefore had to resort to exaggeration, manipulation or outright duplicity to quench her worldly desires. Her biggest sin lay therefore in her deception. Further, she has - by living this way (or having been "forced" to live in this way) enabled her paradox which is that which she most desires, which she most pursues - when satisfied - is what increases her unquenchable desire. This is obvious in her admission of love for the "bad" husbands and the uselessness of the "good" though they were useful in other impersonal, material ways. She loves the "bad" men because she cannot conquer them; she cannot quench her womanhood through them - only in periodic trysts - but as it is in the lovemaking to these men that her womanhood is quenched it is increased (and taken back) by the postcoital treatment the men show her. They do not value her so she sets out to make them value her.

As to the pilgrimage and her fellow pilgrims she could be seen as virtuous (or at least important) if her virtue as an accomplished deceiver (tale teller) is noted as fulfilling the necessary expectation of an evening of narrative play.

Her tragedy otherwise lay in her misconception of what is desirable.

Merry Olde England

In class today we touched on the gradual narrowing in geographic and temporal extent that we see over the course of the first fragment of the Canterbury Tales. The tales become steadily closer to their tellers in space and in time: from "once upon a time in Greece," to "once upon a time in Oxford," to Trumpington near Cambridge now ("Ther gooth a brook, and over that a brigge, / Upon the whiche brook ther stant a melle" [3922-3923]: the present-tense verbs say it all), to "our city," London, again "once upon a time" but a time that is, by all indications, really the present. Building on this observation, I wonder if this steady narrative constriction or withdrawal within the borders of Chaucer's England also represents a way in which the three third-estate narrators in this fragment successively "quite" the Knight and his tale.

After all, we noted, in regard to the Knight's portrait, that his busy and illustrious chivalric career has little or nothing to do with England. His wars are all on the far margins of Europe, and in the past to boot. We hear nothing about the war England was waging right across the Channel in France, and less than nothing about whatever role the Knight might play within English society: the lands he owns, the political or juridical duties he executes, and the members of his own or other social orders that he deals with. England and its affairs are a void at the center of his portrait. The Knight's Tale reaffirms this sense of distance and diffusion, as the Knight not only narrates events that are remote in time and space but also locates himself in this remote sphere, in the strange sequence (1995-2039) wherein he claims to have seen firsthand the temple of Mars and all the horrors adorning it.

The contrast of all this to the Miller's, Reeve's, the Cook's tales, with their quintessentially English locations, characters, names, details, and language, could not be more striking. We can note, in this connection, the way in which the list of nice rustic natural things associated with Miller's Alison includes the staple of the medieval English economy: she is "softer than the wolle is of a wether" (3249). Where the Miller thus slips a reference to the foundation of the national wealth into his tale, the Reeve makes his tale into a microcosm of the nation itself, containing and combining representatives from different regions and dialects into a common English space. And the Cook caps this trajectory by taking us to the capital and metropolis of the kingdom. Coming from Chaucer, the poet who definitively established what the English vernacular was capable of, this steady nationalization, if we may venture to call it that, seems especially resonant.

On the other hand, it would be tough to argue that the Miller's, Reeve's, and Cook's tales bespeak a progressive sense of English patriotism. The narrative space of these tales may become more and more that of contemporary England, but an England in which the national pastimes are vengeance, trickery, and "swiving," in ever cruder and more debased forms, seems to be a creation of, to say the least, decidedly ambiguous value. Chaucer gives with one hand and takes away with the other, granting his audience their own language, their own time, and their own country at the price of a poor image of themselves. I wonder if the baseness of the literary England we have entered by the time the Cook's Tale breaks off is due to its being too insular, too constricted and narrow in its horizons. Is there some kind of median to be found between the wide-ranging life of the Knight and the solidly grounded identities of the three commoners who "quite" him? Will the rest of the tales prove more successful in integrating, or at least mapping routes between there and here, England and the distance and difference of the wider world?  

The Fabliau

Following our discussion today of "The Miller's Tale" as an example of the fabliau genre, I decided to give the class a brief history of this type of writing. Interestingly, The Canterbury Tales is the most oft-cited source of the fabliau (plural: fabliaux). "The Miller's Tale", "The Reeve's Tale" "The Shipman's Tale", "The Summoner's Tale", and the unfinished "Cook's Tale" are all fabliaux, and "The Merchant's Tale"(and possibly others) have aspects of the genre.
These tales were written by jongleurs (professional storytellers) in northeast France around the 13th century. Chaucer reworked this genre for several of the Canterbury tales. The fabliaux are bawdy, crude, and obscene. They are written (orated) in a simple and straightforward manner, but are usually jocular and boisterous as well. The tales take place in the present, with real, imaginable settings and ordinary men and women as characters. The French (and later British) storytellers populated their tales with peasants, clerks, priests, stereotypical women, drunkards, etc. The plots of the fabliaux involve tricks and games, most often with the least clever character ending up much worse off than when he or she started. As we saw with the Miller today and will see with the Reeve on Thursday, the main character often comes off looking like a buffoon who got completely outsmarted.
These stories, though used by Chaucer to characterize the third estate, are not actually very realistic. Unless, of course, men and women of the lower classes in 14-century Europe really were wily, sex-crazed tricksters.
I think that Chaucer's decision to use this type of writing in his tales, especially in such stark contrast with the other genres he incorporates, connects to my first post on Jill Mann's book. His usage of the fabliau style for the tale's of members of the third estate highlights his satire of the three estates. Chaucer uses the fabliau to further stress (along with the commentary and opinions of Chaucer the pilgrim and of the Host) the common though largely innacurate view of the members of the peasantry.

*Here is an interesting link to a comparison of "The Reeve's Tale" and it's French analogue: http://www.bu.edu/english/levine/fabliaux.htm.

Medieval Royal Sketch 1377-1400

Above is a portrait of Richard II at his coronation.

To further describe the political context of Chaucer's world I thought I would describe a little research I've made on the royal lineage which ruled around the time Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales.

Edward III (1312-1377) was grandfather to Richard II (1367-1400; born in Bordeaux, France) who ascended the throne in 1377 when he was just ten years old. His father, Edward, the Black Prince, who was heir apparent to Edward III, died just the year before (Richard's older brother had already died). They were of the House of Plantagenet, a royal lineage founded by Henry II (1133–1189)son of Geoffrey V of Anjou, France known as the Angevin line. Since Richard was so young, his uncle, John of Gaunt, acted as Regent (who had been acting as Regent while Edward III was alive but too old to rule) until Parliamentary figures decided to rule via counsels until Richard was older.

The Peasant's Revolt (or known by its leader as Wat Tyler's Revolt or The Rising as made known in class today) which is described as one of the major disruptions of Richard's rule, occurred in 1381 when Parliament decided to enact a poll tax to continue the war effort (the Hundred Years' War with France). I have also read that wages were reduced but not the price of goods which contributed to the unrest as well as other societal restrictions all of which led to the revolt. Apparently, the 14 year old Richard was courageous as Wat Tyler became abusive at a field meeting between the king and members of the revolt but Tyler was killed on the spot by the Lord Mayor of London for his indiscretion.

The young king immediately thereafter called the rest of the revolt leaders off to the side and made promises to right any wrongs and things were calmed. This was overturned by Richard's counselors and all the leaders of the revolt were hanged instead.

Richard II's rule from 1389 to 1397 was apparently relatively peaceful until 1397 when Richard decided to take revenge on a group of Lords who, from 1387-1389 had temporarily usurped his crown's governmental authority. This is the period of Richard II's so-called tyranny and it is noted that his personality had become disordered by the end of his reign most likely contributing to his vengefulness.

In 1399, the former Regent, John of Gaunt, died and his son Henry Bolingbroke - who was in exile in France - came back with force to England with the intention of usurping the throne from Richard. He succeeded - partly since the country was not interested in keeping Richard around - and became Henry IV (and a future subject for Shakespeare; so too was Richard II).

Richard II was probably murdered in 1400 and this was the beginning of the War of the Roses, which was a war in the House of Plantagenet between cousins in the Lancaster (red rose) and York (white rose) lines. This war did not fully end until the marriage of Henry Tudor, who had become Henry VII in 1485 (he was a descendant of the Lancaster line) and Elizabeth York in 1486. Their heraldic emblem consisted of a larger red, Lancastrian rose behind a white Yorkist rose.