The Reeve's Tale by Chaucer

"Study literature to study man to study life."

NET/SLET/TRB Study Guide
Subject: English, Date: 15.03.2018

This is the third tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and is based on  The sixth tale of the ninth day in Boccaccio's Decameron.  The Reeve Oswald gets affronted by the Miller's Tale that insults the carpenter’s profession because he himself was a carpenter once.  He hurries to repay the Miller by starting his own tale.  A dishonest Miller named Symkyn living near Cambridge used to steal a great deal of wheat and meal from his customers. When the same happens to the sick steward of Cambridge, two Cambridge students, John and Alan vow to beat the Miller at his own game.  They bring a sack of corn and watch the process of grinding pretending as if they don't know anything about grinding.  The miller feels so happy, unites the horses of the students, makes them run behind the horses till night and robs them outrageously.

John and Alan return and request for a stay-and-pay since the night has fallen.  Miller’s is but a single room house and yet he arranges three beds – the first for the Miller with a nearby cradle for his six month old baby boy, the second one for John and Alan and the third for Miller's twenty years old daughter Malyne.  Alan thinks of avenging the Miller and moves over to Malyne's bed and takes advantage of the situation based on the logic “whoever is grieved at one point, is relieved at another.”  The drunken wife goes to relieve herself and John moves the cradle to his bed.  As he planned, Miller's wife returns to John’s bed mistaking it to be the miller's especially seeing the cradle.  He also thus has a happy night. In the early morning, Alan, with emotional words of love,  parts with Malyne who shows him where the stolen flour is.  He comes to Miller's bed taking it to be John’s and tells him how he has repaid the Miller grinding his daughter thrice.  The raged miller rushes to beat the scholars but he’s beaten to the root by his own arrogant wife who mistakes him to one of the scholars.  Meanwhile the scholars flee from the place taking their horse and their stolen flour.  

In Miller’s tale, only his wife is seduced by an Oxford 'scholar' but in Reeve's Tale, both the Miller’s wife and daughter are deflowered by the Cambridge 'scholars.'  Again, the Miller's Tale is a parody of 'the courtly love'  of knight’s tale and here Reeve requites him with the 'cradle-trick tale' that is common during the medieval England and the word grinding is also a common slang for seduction in those days. Bed trick is however not the right way of paying back for miller’s dishonesty and to think of such outrageous stories from the pilgrims to Canterbury raises the question –“ Is the pilgrimage for purification of sins?”