Surplus and Scarcity: two economic models Start Assignment

Lecture 3: The Commoners Rebel1

Before I go into more detail on why Chaucer decides have the Miller interrupt the order of tale

telling (the Host wanted the Monk to follow the Knight), I want to go back over a concept I

brought up in the first lecture, the three estates, because it’s crucial for understanding what is

happening when the Miller barges in and insists on telling his story right after the Knight.

Quick Note: the numbers in parentheses after quotations are all line numbers, so if you’re

looking up a quotation in the book (both hard copy and virtual), keep that in mind.

The Three Estates

In medieval thinking, society consists of three estates: the clergy, the aristocracy, and the

commons. A simple formula characterizes them: those who pray, those who fight, and those

who work. Here’s a wonderful picture of them:

These three men2 personify the three estates. On the left, a clergyman, recognizable by his

shaved (tonsured) head. In the middle, a knight (obviously!). On the right, a peasant holding a

hoe or mattock or something. The priest and the knight are speaking to each other; you can

1 This bulk of this lecture is written by Prof. Tom Stillinger and I have adapted it for this course (with his permission).

2 Note that the “three estates” refers to the status of men. When people talked about “three estates” for women, they were referring to maiden, wife, and widow.

tell by the way they’re facing either other, but also from the fact that each is raising a hand. In

medieval art, their body language says that they’re speaking. The peasant is looking on,

excluded from the conversation but curious. (“Wonder what them guys is talking about…”)

This image—it’s an illuminated capital from a manuscript—is a wonderfully idealized vision of

society. Society is divided, yes, but it’s divided in logical and coherent ways, so that each of the

main divisions is whole, like a person. And the three people can stand together peacefully. The

fact the knight’s leg is in front of the peasant’s leg—that can certainly suggest domination,

hierarchy, but it also serves as a visual reminder of how much the aristocracy and the commons

need each other.

Imagine that we could see all of society all at once! Obviously there will be more than three

figures—each of the three estates will be subdivided. But it’s all organized, and organization is

a kind of beauty. That’s the theory behind the three estates.

But the Narrator of the General Prologue seems oddly unsure of his vision, as he finishes off his

portraits. He sums up confidently enough—“And now I’ve told you the truth about my

friends,/ Their status, how they dressed, and why then went [on the pilgrimage]”(lines 714-15).

But he adds a “But first” on line 723 (p. 24) and starts apologizing, starts excusing himself.

This is a passage of great interest—for one thing, the relationship between Author and Narrator

is certainly put under the spotlight. I want to focus on just one specific apology:

And please, if you can try not to be angry at me

For failing to properly show nobility,

Here in this tale, as nobility should be.

I’m neither noble nor smart, as you can see. (742-45)

In the original Middle English, Chaucer uses the word “degree” which Burton Raffel has translated as “nobility.” But this kind of misses the point, which is that Chaucer is apologizing for not putting everyone in the proper order of their status: “Also I praye you to foryive it me Al have I nat set folk in hir degree.” Degree is a hugely important word. The narrator’s point is this: he tried to rank the pilgrims, to list them in the order of their rank, and he’s not at all sure he succeeded.

I want to go into that effort, and its failure.

The Narrator’s Will to Order

The Narrator started off with the Knight, and that was an easy call—he has the highest social

standing of anyone in this group. His name implies he’s a member of the aristocracy—a

“gentil,” to use Chaucer’s word. And he’s the leader of a little entourage. He’s traveling with

his son (the Squire) and his servant (the Yeoman). Those two relationships—father-son and

master-servant—are classic templates for hierarchy in general. The GP begins with a sense

that the structure of society is easy to discern. The Narrator then turns to the second estate, the

clergy, and he begins with the highest-ranking of all the religious people on the pilgrimage—

the Prioress, who heads a convent. She too is traveling with an entourage, another nun and

three priests, though they aren’t described. And then we stay on the religious side for a while,

plausibly taking a gentle downward journey.

And at the end the structure seems clear enough: the last five pilgrims, grouped together in an

introductory sentence, are clearly the lowest of all the characters. They’re “churls,” as the

Narrator will say of the Steward and Miller in the Miller’s Prologue.

But what about the middle?—and the middle is most of it! Well, many of the pilgrims belong

to that third estate, the commons. To the political imagination of the Middle Ages, they are the

equivalent of peasants. But can the Merchant really be called a peasant? He’s wealthy and

proud; he looks down on most of the world. What about the Franklin, the five Guildsmen, the

Wife of Bath?

Perhaps you’ve seen this coming, but here it is: we are dealing with the rise of the middle

class. The society of Chaucer’s time faced a schism between lived reality (in which vast

amounts of money and social status were controlled by people who were neither clergy nor

nobility) and an ideal self-image (in which a commoner is a peasant, as in the manuscript

illumination). So the middle of the GP is a shapeless, seemingly improvised jumble of

people— there are no more aristocrats, and the clergy (including the devious Summoner and

Pardon Peddler) are mixed in among the commoners. That’s what the Narrator is nervous

about. He would dearly have loved to go in rank order, but there just wasn’t any way to do

that: in some ways, the ideal structure has become an impossible dream.

One appealing way to describe this is to say that the pilgrim company becomes a little society

of its own—and a little society that looks very different from the big society all around. In the

pilgrim society, the Host (a commoner, and essentially a servant to people like the Knight and

Prioress) will rule; there will be no distinction among the pilgrims, as everybody tells the same

number of stories and everyone is subject to the Host. This is a version of what moderns

sometimes call “the carnivalesque”—a short-lived social space in which normal rules are

suspended or reversed. It’s a space of play, even of celebration, like the Carnival itself. It’s a

perfect place for stories.

But look what happens in the morning. The Host begins his reign by randomly designating the

first story-teller. He has them draw straws. (I never know when social customs just vanish

from the earth. Are you familiar with drawing straws? One straw is longer or shorter than all

the others, but you hold them so the chooser can’t see the bottom of the straws, just the lined-

up tops. Whoever draws the long or short straw gets the prize, or goes on the suicide mission,

or whatever.) And who is it that’s randomly chosen? The Knight! Which makes everyone

happy (844).

As I suggested in the last lecture, be suspicious. I can’t prove anything, but I think there’s a

chance the Host rigged the game. (That’s not hard to do with straws, by the way.) Some

evidence? Well, listen to how the Host calls the pilgrims together:

“Sir Knight, my master and my lord,

Draw first.” The Knight duly obeyed his word.

“Come near,” said our host, “my Lady Prioress.

And you, Sir Cleric, shed your bashfulness,

Don’t study these straws! Everyone, use your hands?” (lines 835-39)

The Host has the same idea of order as the Narrator: when he’s given a free choice about where

to begin, he begins with the Knight. Then he goes to the highest-ranking of the religious, the

Prioress. The Cleric is singled out from all the people further down the ladder—who are

lumped together as “every man.” And notice how carefully the Host modulates his rhetoric.

Speaking to the Knight he spends half a line expressing deference (“my master and my lord”),

before reminding the Knight of the rules of the new game. Speaking to the Prioress, he’s

briefer—but “my Lady” is an honorific term of address. With the Cleric, the Host’s tone is

teasing, not nearly as deferential.

An innkeeper doesn’t succeed in his business if he fails to recognize fine social distinctions.

The Host is accustomed to dealing with people from all different levels, and treating them

according to their level. I have a very strong feeling, then, that the Host wanted to give the

Knight priority—not only in the speech I’ve just quoted, but in the story-telling game. It may

just be a coincidence that the Knight drew the right straw; I tend to think the Host helped it

happen. And this story teaches an interesting little lesson about social status in the Middle Ages.

When the Host puts the Knight first, he’s not doing it to please the Knight in particular.

(There’s no reason at all to suppose that the Knight wanted to be the first story-teller.) He’s

doing it to please everyone. Nobody else would want to go before the Knight; it would be like

walking through a door ahead of him. Everybody is happy when the temporary social order of

the story-telling pilgrimage magically coincides with the real-world order they know.

The Miller’s Prologue

As you all have read, the Knight does indeed tell the first tale—one of the longest in the whole

collection. It’s a brilliant, beautiful piece of work, particularly if you can read it in the original

Middle English. The Knight’s story features only characters of noble birth, living in a mythical

time long ago, and these characters are given to long discourses on love. It is stately in its

pacing, and it finally reaches an ending which provides very satisfying narrative closure but

which raises philosophical and moral issues which may or may not be resolved.

Once this long, high-flown, courtly performance, has come to an end, the Miller’s Prologue

begins by stating that everyone agrees “this was a noble story”(3). Notice Chaucer doesn’t say

that everyone liked it. But the most enthusiastic group is the other nobles on the pilgrimage, what

the Narrator calls “the pilgrims of loftier breeding” (5). And they were probably the Knight’s

target audience. The ones he most wanted to entertain and instruct.

Miller’s Prologue soon becomes a drama in itself. The Host has apparently forgotten all about

his little game of drawing straws (another argument for the idea that it wasn’t legit in the first

place). He turns to the Monk. Now, twice before we were given the order the Knight (+

entourage), then the Prioress (+ her entourage) and then the Monk—but I assume the Host feels

more comfortable (and thinks everyone else will feel more comfortable) with another male

storyteller, so he goes to the next highest-seeming of the religious group and the one religious

figure who actually seems like a knight, given his interest in hunting and horses. Like the

Narrator in the GP, the Host is hoping to maintain a version of real-life social degree within the

special world of the pilgrimage. But the Miller butts in!

The Miller’s outburst seems to light a spark—the Steward jumps in too, and the Miller and the

Steward go at each other, verbally. The Miller, despite his ostensible drunkenness, is a superb

rhetorician both in the Prologue and in his Tale, and he bests the Steward with a sort of verbal

judo. And now our Narrator (or Author?) gets nervous, and puts in a kind of apology or

warning of own—don’t blame me, I have to write down what they said! (This oddly echoes the

Miller’s own apology: don’t blame me, blame the ale of Southwerk.) The world of the Tales

is finally becoming seriously carnivalesque, seriously festive.

As you can imagine when people compare the Miller’s Tale to the Knight’s Tale, there is often

an implied ranking. Students often describe the Miller’s Tale as “less”—less noble than the

Knight’s tale, less moral, less full of wisdom, even just smaller in its geographical and temporal

spread. But this kind of thinking, taken to an extreme, could suggest that we arrive at the

Miller’s Tale by starting with something the Knight’s Tale, and removing things from it:

getting rid of some of that nobility, some of that moral dignity.

Yet, Chaucer is the one who decides to have the Miller challenge the Knight and declare that he

can tell a superior story: “By the very bones of God/ I know a noble tale that cries to be told,/ So

now I’ll tell it better than the Knight told his” (lines 17-19). I’d like you consider the possibility

that the Miller is—believe it or not—a deep moral thinker and quite possibly a better storyteller

than the Knight. Or at least that the Miller’s Tale offers a world of its own, complete with

powerful moral claims. It’s not just a mockery of nobility (though it is that) but an affirmation of

deeply-held values. From the point of view of the Miller, I’m going to suggest, the nobility of

the Knight’s Tale isn’t just an imposition from above; such “nobility” also misses, positively

misunderstands and misrepresents, something central to life. One name for that central thing

would be the powerful force mentioned at the beginning of the Canterbury Tales: Nature.

The Miller’s Tale

The Miller’s Tale really ought to be shared by people in a group. A professor of mine in

graduate school (a very large, important professor) read the whole thing aloud once a year, in

Middle English of course, and it was great—it was a chance for everyone to hear Chaucer and to

laugh together. I imagine most of you read this text silently, to yourself; I can only hope you

broke the silence occasionally with laughter. But, as you know if you’ve ever watched a

supremely funny movie all alone, comedy works a lot better with an audience. The Miller’s

Tale, of course, has an audience the first time it’s told: the pilgrims. Their response is

somewhat mixed, but basically quite positive. I’m going to quote the next bit after the Miller’s

Tale:

Everyone laughed at this silly, foolish and funy

Story. But some among them saw it one way,

And others insisted on seeing it differently.

Yet most were laughing, which showed their common sense.

I like the layers of response: everyone laughs (you have to!); then people talk about the Tale,

and have different opinions about it; and, after that thinking, most people go back to laughing.3

So, if we were all in a classroom together, having read the Tale separately, one of my jobs would

be to make possible a shared experience—I usually end up going over the plot in some detail,

just because it’s so funny. Writing this lecture, it doesn’t seem right just to recapitulate the

action. You read it; if you have any questions, you must bring them up in the discussion or in an

email to me. I’m afraid this lecture will seem lamentably serious. Maybe I’ll just throw in a

quick epigraph, to remind you what we’re talking about:

Then Nicolas let loose a fart

As fierce and hot and heavy as a thunder-dart. (698-9)

Farts are vulgar, yes, and so is the Miller. But everyone thinks they’re funny, not just the low

class folks on the pilgrimage. Even today, farts “sell” and the movies and jokes and stories that

feature them aren’t just for a particular class or audience. Let’s look more closely at the category

or genre of story that Miller tells.

The fabliau genre

The Miller’s Tale (MillT) belongs to a kind of story called a fabliau. It’s a French word and

related to our word “fable”. Essentially a fabliau is a dirty story told in verse. The first ones are

French, and are written in the most common Old French verse form, short rhymed couplets. The

narratives are brief and efficient. There is a minimum of description, or indeed of anything that

would distract from the drive of the action. A handful of stock characters turn up over and over

again: a jealous old husband; a beautiful young wife; a lascivious priest or student. The last two

things I’ve said are logically connected: you can do without description if you use stock

characters. Say “jealous old husband,” and you’ve said all that needs to be said about that guy.4

French fabliaux (yes, that’s the plural) are a lot of fun to read—they’re zippy and often really

funny. If you want to look at some yourself, there’s a small collection on the Harvard Chaucer

page. One of my favorites (and one of the shortest) is “The Priest Who Peeked”—

3 The only one who doesn’t laugh is the Steward. In the Miller’s Prologue he took personal offense at the Miller’s choice of a carpenter as the butt of the joke—because the Steward was himself a carpenter in his youth—and he’s

been nursing this grudge as he listened to the Tale. He now tells his own Tale, a deliberate attempt to get even with

the Miller. More on this in a second lecture I’ll be sending out this week.

4 When I was little, and long before that, there was a genre of jokes called “traveling salesman jokes.” They

typically involved a traveling salesman whose car breaks down, a farmer who puts him up for the night, and the

farmer’s beautiful daughter. In those jokes, as in Old French fabliau, there was no need for more detailed

characterization. I think the genre has quite vanished—partly because traveling salesmen have pretty much

vanished, but also because we just don’t seem to have that kind of genre of joke any more. The last surviving

narrative joke genre I can think of is the “X walks into a bar” kind of joke. I’m speaking as a total amateur, by the

way—let me know if you have any thoughts or corrections!

http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/litsubs/fabliaux/priest.html. Peek at it or not. (And

note that my tastes may well be different from yours!)

You’ll already have figured out several ways the MillT is atypical of the genre. There’s a lot of

description. The wife in “The Priest Who Peeked” is “Wise, courteous, and well bred; / She was

beautiful and came from a good family.” That’s all the description we get. Alisoun is described

in a set-piece that goes on for 38 lines! Nicolas and Absolom are also described at some length.

Beyond this, the world of the MillT is fleshed out with detail in a way that’s quite missing from

the earlier French fabliau. In “The Priest Who Peeked,” an opening in a door plays a central role

in the story: people look through it in consequential ways. But it’s just “an opening in a door”—

there’s no need to say more about it. In the MillT, the servant Robin spies into Nicholas’s study

through a hole—“An hole he foond ful lowe upon a boord, / Ther as the cat was wont in for to

creepe” (332-3). A medieval pet-door! The cat plays no part in the Tale, except to contribute to

the life, depth, realism5 of the setting.

So large quantities of description, of circumstantial detail, are added to the form. Also added is a

kind of rhetorical extravagance, on the part of the narrator and the part of the characters. I’ll just

mention one example: when Absolom comes to serenade Alisoun, his speech is full of surprising

images:

“How are you , Alison sweet, my honeycomb,

My beautiful bird, my sweetest cinnamon?” (499-500)

Cinnamon as a term of endearment? In fact this whole speech is laced with language from the

Song of Songs, the Old Testament marriage song which is, itself, packed with lush erotic

imagery. Medieval Christians universally understood the Song of Songs as an allegory: the

husband and wife stand for Christ and the Church. Absolom’s speech strips away the allegory,

returning the biblical text to its apparent erotic meaning. This extended allusion has many

effects: it reminds us of Absolom’s education; it shows that he likes to show off his education,

or at least put it to good practical use (seducing a married woman); it reminds us how much

Absolom is in love with an idea of love rather than with Alisoun herself; more simply, it shows

how pretentious he is; it gives him a certain dignity so that his fall into humiliation is all the

more painful or funny; interestingly, it tells us that the Miller, the story-teller, is no dummy, and

may not even be as drunk as he seemed to be at the start of his performance. These are all

possible effects, anyway. For now I’m just pointing out that this is all Chaucer, not the genre.

In some ways the MillT even fights against the genre it so clearly belongs to. Let’s think more

about stereotyped characters. We know that John, the carpenter husband, is jealous. The Miller

says so (115) and so does Alisoun herself (186-8).6 But is he? He never acts jealous, as far as I

can see. And he certainly could. The first time Absolom comes to serenade Alisoun, she’s in

bed with John, and John hears him sing, and he says, “What! Alison! Do you hear that idiot

Absalom?” She says yes, and the scene is over. Where’s the jealousy? Later on, when John

5 Whenever I say “realism” you should remember that I don’t mean “accuracy,” I mean the feeling of reality, the

feeling that we’re looking through a window (!) at a real world rather than an imaginary construct. 6 Of course Alisoun may have personal reasons for exaggerating John’s jealousy.

learns that the entire world is going to be destroyed in a flood, his first thought is his wife—

rather than worrying about his own death, or the death of the entire human race, he says, “Alas,

for my wife! / Must she be drowned? Alas, my love, my life!” (414-15). My impression from

the action is that John is a loving and rather un-jealous husband. Yet the plot demands that he be

The Jealous Husband. The friction this creates is interesting. This will seem like a very strange

analogy, but earlier I argued that the GP offers both a vision of ideal order and proof that the

world is full of realities that resist that order. The MillT is both a full-fledged fabliau—and, truly

the best one ever written—and a reminder that real people don’t really fit into stereotyping

genres. In this respect, Chaucer is also asking us not to stereotype the Miller. Though he initially

comes across like a drunk, illiterate peasant, the character Chaucer creates is actually a brilliant

story-teller who can indeed challenge the Knight and even best him.

Yet, the Miller is definitely more on the margins of society than the Knight. And when Chaucer

gives him a chance to tell his story right after the Knight’s tale, we need to consider more closely

what Chaucer is saying about margins and marginality both in literature and in the social

hierarchy.

The marginal

I want to say some brief, possibly cryptic things about the kind of threat the Miller poses to the

social order in which he lives. As so often, I’m going to argue for two contradictory readings.

First, let’s back up and just think about all the ways the Miller is low. He’s of a low social class.

One sign of that is how much he’s identified as a body. You may remember, in my picture of the

Three Estates (last lecture) that the peasant was showing a lot of skin; his feet and legs were bare

to just above the knees, and of course you saw his face. The priest showed his hands, face, and a

bit of ankle above his slippers. The knight was completely covered by his armor. That wasn’t (I

think) an accident. Here are some pictures from a great late-medieval Book of Hours (keep

scrolling down):

Both pictures (they depict February and September) shows peasants working in front of a

splendid castle—the actual castle of the artist’s patron, the Duc de Berry. I promise you that if

there were lords and ladies in the picture, they wouldn’t be showing skin this way. I especially

like the fellow in the second picture, bending over and giving us a look at his Fruit-of-the-

Looms. He’s showing his bottom because he’s on the bottom. (Yet, mostly I don’t think these

are mean pictures: surely some lords felt affection for the people who actually worked, and these

peasants seem to be working especially hard.)

Now, if the Miller busts into the decorous game the Host had in mind, seizing the microphone or

the spotlight or whatever you like, is he actually changing something? One reading: yes. He’s

giving a voice to the voiceless, insisting on the importance of his own experience (even if he’s

doing it in an extremely sophisticated, extremely indirect way). He’s putting himself, and that

peasant with the mattock (from the Three Estates picture in the last lecture), in the center of the

picture. And he’s insisting his style of storytelling is as good as the Knight’s.

The other reading says (get ready): no. Medieval culture always had ways of imagining the low,

the excluded, the marginal. “Marginal” sounds like a metaphor, but I want to use it more

literally. Medieval manuscripts show a kind of hierarchy laid out on the page: not, usually, from

top to bottom but from the center to the outside. Here’s a page:

You can enlarge this on your screen, I hope. The center of the page is divided between a few

lines of Scripture and a large, beautiful image. (The scene is the Visitation, when Elizabeth,

pregnant with John the Baptist, visits Mary, pregnant with Jesus.) The arch in the chapel on the

left is echoed by the arch-shape at the top of the whole image. But then, all around, floating in

parchment space, are peculiar images—what we call “grotesques.” Some of them are just

decorative, like the curly leaves or petals on the lower right; others are fantastical, like the man

fighting bats with a sword, or the man defending his castle from a gigantic snail, or the man

pulling a bagpipe-playing mouse on a cart.

These images are silly, fun; sometimes they get positively obscene. Ready?

Again, there’s a pious image (it’s John the Baptist, all grown up!) in a central frame that looks

like a little shrine—and again, the images on the edges are of a lower sort entirely. At the top, a

bird—nice! In the middle, next to the initial, a rabbit. And at the bottom a lady dancing to

bagpipe music played by a figure with a priest’s tonsured head and the legs and tail of—I’m not

sure, are those hooves? Anyway, an animal. Okay, maybe “obscene” is too strong. But we’re

told that rabbits often have erotic significance, partly because of a pun in French, and the lady is

certainly enjoying herself in a sensual way. (One scholar connects scenes like this to the “old

dance” of love, mentioned in the portrait of the Wife of Bath, which stands in contrast to the

“new song” sung in Heaven according to the last Psalm.) And there may be a visual pun—

believe me, I’m not the one who noticed it!—in the bagpipes. There’s a strong implication that

this is the same “revel and melody” that kept Nicholas and Alisoun so busy.

Who plays bagpipes? A mouse on a cart, and this guy, and the Miller, who in the GP is said to

lead the procession out of town with his “baggepipe” (GP 567).

I’ll end with two more images—you didn’t know there’d be another slide show! The first is

much like the one we just saw, but I think it’s so funny:

Wow—she really likes the music! And here’s one that does cross some kind of line:

No bagpipes here, no music, just literal action—and the same gesture that we saw Nicolas try out

at the beginning of the Miller’s Tale. (But it’s not all literal; the broomstick inexplicably lodged

in the hole above the door must have some sort of metaphorical implication.)

Yet this is a Book of Hours! That is to say, it’s a book of Psalms, arranged according to their

liturgical use around the year. This book was used by religious people as they prayed. For most

of us, sexual images like this would seem an obvious distraction, an obvious detraction from the

serious religious purpose of the book. There are enough pages like this to suggest that medieval

people didn’t feel that way. (The images, by the way, are drawn by the same artists who did the

pious images—they weren’t added by irreverent students!) The only way I can put it together is

to think that, in an image like this, sin is imagined and put in its place, its low place away from

the center.

All this is to say that the Miller may want to claim a place in the center—but nothing would stop

the Knight or the Host or anyone else from seeing him as a marginal, grotesque figure. You

could laugh at the Miller, even laugh with the Miller, without shaking the foundations of the

culture in any way.

Let’s stop here for now. I’ll post a separate lecture in the next day that continues this discussion

with a look at the Steward’s Tale.