Book Review Chaucer The Canterbury Tales The Nuns Priests Tale

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With a request for a lighter story to follow the Monk’s preceding catalogue of tragedy and death, a priest, Sir John, accompanying a young Nun to Canterbury, offers a suitable story. He claims it is true, though what he offers is actually an anthropomorphic beast fable. A widow struggles to raise two daughters on a quiet country farm. She has some livestock, and seven hens, serviced by a fine black Cockerel. The story doesn’t concern the widow, but the cockerel itself. When not making love, the cockerel and hens have long philosophical discussions. When the cockerel has a troubling nightmare in which he dies, the hens interpret the dream as an omen of warning that he should not venture outdoors on the first day of spring. They cite examples from literature of people who ignored such ominous warnings and met an unpleasant doom. The Cockerel laughs off such superstitious nonsense, and on the first day of spring he pops outside, where he soon captured by a cunning fox of the kind familiar from Aesopian fables. The fox runs off with the captured Cockerel, and the hens lament that the dream prophesy has come true, but their lament attracts the attention of the widow, her daughters and half the town, who give chase and this, combined with the Cockerel’s own cunning, causes the fox to drop his prey unharmed and flee. The curse has been broken, and fate itself has been cheated. The story is written in such away that its nonsensical elements, such as hens who recommend appropriate laxatives for the constipated cockerel, totally credible, and you actually find yourself caring about the poor bird’s fate, which seems inevitable right up to his rescue. It is Chaucer’s ability to throw such unexpected changes of pace and story tempo into the Canterbury Tales that makes the silly story work so well. Arthur Chappell