4 - Churls: commerce and the material world

Summary

When the drunken Miller intrudes on the Host's attempt to order the sequence of tale-telling with his “legend” of a carpenter and his wife, his purpose is to “quite” or “repay” the Knight's tale. He responds as a “churl” to a tale of upper-class manners and values, and the bawdy energy of his performance is in itself an apt comment on the Knight's abstract and ritualized universe. It is an essentially conservative response: the Miller offers no alternative to a social structure in which churls and gentles have their proper stations. But his tale sets a complex process in motion. As we move forward through the increasingly violent give-and-take of the Reeve's fabliau to the Cook's world of anarchic self-indulgence, hierarchy is abandoned, and as the poem proceeds it becomes hard to discern any such clear-cut opposition of values as that between Knight and Miller.

The tellers of the tales to be discussed in this chapter, though they include the gentle Merchant and worthy Friar, can all be called “churls.” Their viewpoint is materialistic and amoral but, with no regard for orthodox social and religious values, they exhibit a strong, unwieldy aptitude for social criticism. Nearly all their tales are comic, but their lives and the lives of their characters are often so distorted by ambition, the commercializing of social relations, or the bitterness of empty old age as to make it impossible for them to pursue even the elemental goods of food, drink, and sex in a straightforward way.