The Knight is a flower of chivalry; he has sought honour everywhere, in the dangerous crusade against the barbarians of Pruce (Prussia), against the Moors, against the Turks: he is a fighting man who speaks no evil and bears no malice. His tale is from the old Romance of Thebes and Athens, and has its root in ancient Athenian literature, though its flowers are derived from mediaeval fancy, and mainly from the Italian poem, the "Teseid," or poem of Theseus, by Boccaccio. It is written in the rhyming couplets of five feet apiece which are practically the great metrical gift of Chaucer to English poetry: he took to them late in life, about 1385-1386, and his tales in this measure were made later than his stories in stanzas.
The jolly Host of the Tabard, who directs the tale-telling of the Company, next asks, out of respect, the Monk to follow the Knight; but the rude Miller is drunk, and insists on being heard.
For I wol speke or elles go my wey.
Thus the noble tale is followed by a "churl's tale" for the sake of contrast, and Chaucer warns his readers that a coarse story it is, and that whoever does not want to hear it must turn the pages over and pass on. The Miller begins decorously enough with a description of a pretty young musical scholar of Oxford, that could read the stars and predict the weather, and lodged with an old carpenter that had a pretty young wife, and had never read Cato who would have advised him to mate with an older woman. The Miller's description of the pretty young woman is more delicate than we expect from this noisy drunkard. A parish clerk, not more godly than the scholar, is next introduced; and a peculiarly broad piece of rural pleasantry finishes the story of the Miller.
The listeners laughed at "this nice case," all but the Reeve, who was a carpenter by trade, and did not like a carpenter to be mocked. He therefore tells a tale against a Miller, a proud and dishonest Miller, who suffers loss and infinite dishonour and has his head broken, at the hands of two young Cambridge men. This tale also may be judiciously skipped: the fourth is that of the Cook, and is only a fragment: manifestly it was to be matter of rude, mirth, but Chaucer dropped it. The Host calls in The Man of Law, whose story is told in stanzas; The Man of Law was himself told it by merchants. It is an early piece of work by Chaucer, fitted into this place. He had plenty of short stories of many kinds, written by himself at various dates, and he placed them into the mouths of the pilgrims; not always quite appropriately. The Man of Law's tale of fair Constance, daughter of an Emperor of Rome, herself a pearl of beauty and goodness, persecuted by elderly ladies professing the Moslem or heathen religion, and driven from Syria to pagan Northumberland, is partly based on a widely diffused fairy-tale. It is pure and tender, and more fit for the ears of the Prioress than several of the coarse comic stories. In these days, as Chaucer would learn from the "Decameron" of Boccaccio, ladies listened to very strange narratives.
The Host next bids the Parish Priest to tell a story, and swears in a style which the good parson resents. The Host "smells a Lollard," or Puritan heretic, in a clergyman who objects to swearing, which suggests that the orthodox priests were very indulgent!
The sailor, or shipman, a rough brown man and "a good fellow," cries
heer he shal nat preche,
He shal no gospel glosen heer ne teche,
he is a heretic, a sower of tares among the wheat; and, to check heresy tells a story far from creditable to the morals of a monk. This is in the "heroic" verse, rhymed couplets of ten syllables each, like the coarse stories of the Reeve and the Miller. As this measure was adopted late by Chaucer, in place of the earlier stanzas, it appears that his taste did not grow more delicate with his advance in years.