The Host voices the common consent, reinforcing his speech for once with a prayer instead of an oath. The Parson then launches out into a treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins and their remedies, translated from the French of a 13th-century friar. The treatise (like Chaucer’s other prose writings) lacks the style of his verse; but it contains one lively and amusing chapter of his own insertion, satirizing the extravagance of costume in his day (lines 407 ff.).

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FROM W. SMITH’S DRAWING OF 1588. (SLOANE MS. 2596).
THE PILGRIMS ENTERED BY THE WEST GATE (NO. 6)

Long before the Parson had ended, the city must have been in full view below—white-walled, red-roofed amid its orchards and green meadows, but lacking that perfect bell-tower which, from far and near, is now the fairest sight of all. At this point an anonymous and far inferior poet has continued Chaucer’s narrative in the “Tale of Beryn.” The prologue to that tale shows us the pilgrims putting up at the Chequers Inn, “that many a man doth know,” fragments of which may still be seen close to the Cathedral at the corner of Mercery Lane.[167] Travelling as they did in force—and especially with such redoubtable champions among their party—they would no doubt have been able to choose this desirable hostel without too great molestation; but in favour of less able-bodied pilgrims the city authorities were obliged to pass a law that no hosteler should “disturb no manner of strange man coming to the city for to take his inn; but it shall be lawful to take his inn at his own lust without disturbance of any hosteler.”[168] In the Cathedral itself—

The Pardoner and the Miller, and other lewd sots,
Sought themselves in the church right as lewd goats,
Peerëd fast and porëd high upon the glass,
Counterfeiting gentlemen, the armës for to blase,[blazon

till the Host bade them show better manners, and go offer at the shrine. “Then passed they forth boisterously, goggling with their heads,” kissed the relics dutifully, saw the different holy places, and presently sat down to dinner. How the Miller (being accustomed to such sleight of hand) stole afterwards a bosom-full of “Canterbury brooches”; how uproarious was the merriment after supper, and how the Pardoner became the hero of a scandalous adventure—this and much more may be read at length in the prologue to the “Tale of Beryn.” It will already have been noted, however, that the anonymous poet entirely agrees with Chaucer in laying stress on what may be called the bank-holiday side of the pilgrimage. That side does indeed come out with rather more than its due prominence when we thus skip the separate tales and run straight through the plot of the pilgrims’ journey; but, when all allowances have been made, Chaucer enables us to understand why orthodox preachers spoke on this subject almost as strongly as the heresiarch Wycliffe; and, on the other hand, how great a gap was made in the life of the common folk by the abolition of pilgrimages.

The very fidelity with which the poet paints his own time shows us the Reformation in embryo. We have in fact here, within the six hundred pages of the “Canterbury Tales,” one of the most vivid and significant of all scenes in the great Legend of the Ages; and his pilgrims, so intent upon the present, so exactly mirrored by Chaucer as they moved and spoke in their own time, tell us nevertheless both of another age that was almost past and of a future time which was not yet ripe for reality. The Knight is still of course the most respected figure in such a company; and he brings into the book a pale afterglow of the real crusades; but the Host now treads close upon his heels, big with the importance of a prosperous citizen who has twice sat in Parliament side by side with knights of the shire. The good Prioress recalls faintly the heroic age of monasticism; yet St. Benedict and St. Francis would have recognized their truest son in the poor Parson, upon whom the pilgrims called only in the last resort. The Monk and the Friar, the Summoner and the Pardoner, do indeed remind us how large a share the Church claimed in every department of daily life; but they make us ask at the same time “how long can it last?” Extremes meet; and the “lewd sots” who went “goggling with their heads,” gaping and disputing at the painted windows on their way to the shrine, were lineal ancestors to the notorious “Blue Dick” of 250 years later, who made a merit of having mounted on a lofty ladder, pike in hand, to “rattle down proud Becket’s glassie bones.”