Abstract
Criticism of The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale has focused on the Pardoner’s complicated identity and his rhetorical agenda, but the image of the murder itself was evocative for Chaucer’s audience, as illustrated by an early fifteenth-century wooden chest panel featuring the murder scene. This chapter analyzes The Pardoner’s Tale in the context of the late medieval discourse of death and money, to reconcile the directly antimoney ars moriendi of Chaucer’s Pardoner with the much more ambivalent attitude toward trade and commerce that Chaucer displays elsewhere in The Canterbury Tales. The Pardoner’s transparent profit motive, his Tale’s deployment of a traditional suspicion of money, and the apparent resonance of this story for Chaucer’s audience reveal the deep ambivalence of the late Middle Ages toward money and economy.
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Notes
- 1.
Given that only the right side of the front panel of this chest survives, it seems unlikely that it would have been a very secure place to store a great deal of money. On the dimensions and materials of the chest, as well as its acquisition by the Museum of London in 1975, see Whitaker (1999), 174–6.
- 2.
See Whitaker, 176–8 for the description of the chest and its depiction of the rioters’ clothing.
- 3.
The suggestion would require pushing the dating of the chest to the earlier portion of the 1400–10 estimate she cites (174).
- 4.
On the fox, see Whitaker, 181–2.
- 5.
For his take on the Pardoner, see Kittredge (1915), 211–18.
- 6.
Whitaker suggests that perhaps the other half of the front panel (left of the space for the lock at the upper left side of the surviving piece) told the beginning of the story. Of course, this is no more provable than Chaucer’s ownership.
- 7.
For the English, see The Catholic Comparative New Testament (2005); of the translations included, the Rheims, Revised Standard, New American, and New Revised Standard all share the cited English wording.
- 8.
See also Newhauser (2000).
- 9.
- 10.
With the density of gold 0.01932 kg/cubic cm, and the metric volume of a bushel 35,240 cubic cm (conservatively using the smaller American bushel rather than the Imperial, on the grounds that the American bushel derives from the standard of the Winchester bushel), this puts the weight of that volume of solid gold somewhere around 5447 kg, or roughly 6 tons. Using a random packing ratio of 57%, that reduces the hoard to 3105 kg, roughly 3.4 US (short) tons or 3.2 UK (long) tons. There are various uncertainties or “fudge factors” here, including changes in volume measures between then and now, the accuracy of the drunken rioters’ estimate of the volume of the pile of money, and the packing density of coins versus solid gold. For the 57% packing density, see Chaikin et al. (2006). Even with this relatively low packing density, this is still an amount of money considerably beyond what one would reasonably expect to see in real life. For a useful discussion of the uncertainties in the medieval bushel, see Masschaele (1993), 277–9. Masschaele approximates the medieval bushel at a ratio of 1.27 Winchester bushels to one average medieval bushel (278); using his bushel would reduce our 3105 kg to 2453 kg. Such a reduced volume of gold still remains far more than three drunkards could realistically bring home.
- 11.
Not, perhaps, all that portable; at a density of 0.01049 kilograms/cubic cm for pure silver, also assuming a packing density of 57% and a bushel volume of 35,240 cubic cm, 8 bushels of silver would weigh roughly 1686 kilograms, just under 2 US tons or 1.7 UK tons. Coined silver would presumably be of a slightly lower density but not by so much that it would make a significant difference in the overall mass of the hoard .
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
One could effectively substitute any exaggerated amount, such as “boatload,” or “ton of money” for “eighte bushells” with no substantive change to the narrative.
- 15.
- 16.
Whitaker (1999), 174, indicates that “traces of the original polychromy remain in the interstices,” but neither her picture nor the color plate available through the museum’s website indicate what color the coins might once have been painted.
- 17.
- 18.
Galloway has done interesting work with such chests in the work of John Gower; he argues that the household chest “was a late medieval prop directly involved in keeping and using wealth; as a tool for shipment as well as household security, it indicated the wide-ranging apparatus and capabilities of mercantilism , more fully indeed than gold or contracts” (2011, 106–7).
- 19.
- 20.
- 21.
For a reader familiar with the sorts of intertexts on which Curry, Miller, or Patterson rely, the notion of spiritual sterility that such readings apply to the Pardoner’s preaching makes perfect sense. For a reader more interested in the complication of gendered identity, the Pardoner’s indeterminacy speaks (or fails to speak) for itself.
- 22.
It does not seem a coincidence that the most similar tale in terms of setting and character is The Cook’s Tale, the only tale set in London , and one which bountifully demonstrates some of the same tavern sins that the Pardoner decries. See Bertolet (2002).
- 23.
See Malo on the pardoner as a “relic custodian” (2008, 84), rather than the salesman he is often assumed to be.
- 24.
- 25.
See Ladd (2012).
- 26.
- 27.
Appleford points to Thomas Wimbledon’s Redde Rationem, several versions (especially E) of the Visitation of the Sick, Julian of Norwich’s Shewings, and Walter Hilton’s On Mixed Life.
- 28.
For a good poetic description of the dead kings, see “De tribus regibus mortuis,” where they are depicted as having “lost the lyp and the lyver” (l. 45), with “bonus [bones], that blake bene and bare” (l. 106) (Audelay 2009). For a high-quality (if post-Chaucerian) visual representation of the three living and three dead, see fol. 86v of the Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. There is a good representation of it in The Trés Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry (1969), plate 80.
- 29.
Another significant difference is the question of the Three Living being on horseback, which seems to have been relatively standard in visual representations of this trope, especially the numerous surviving ones in France —according to the Groupe de Recherches sur les Peintures Murales, “les Vifs sont majoritairement à cheval,” (29), with dogs and falcons present “dans quasiment toutes les scènes” (29). The horses are often rearing (61–158), however, which does resemble the rather odd angle of the three “riotours” in the central murder in the panel. Indeed, an image of one of the Living, which the Groupe des Recherches prints from the parish church of Saint Hilaire in Villiers-sur-Loire, Loir-et-Cher, bears a striking resemblance to the Ellesmere manuscript’s squire, cited by Whittaker as a close resemblance to the riotours on the panel (158). Vifs Nous Sommes … Morts Nous Serons: La Rencontre des trois morts et des trois vifs dans la peinture murale en France (2001).
- 30.
Edwards indicates that hunting is a common motif in murals of the Three Living and the Three Dead (1994), 420.
- 31.
This is a subject I discuss at some length in Ladd (2010) as well, especially in my reading of the York “Last Judgement.” See 6ff., 133ff.
- 32.
“Esurivi enim, et dedistis mihi manducare; sitivi, et dedistis mihi bibere; hospes eram, et colexistis me; nudus, et operuistis me; infirmus, et visitastis me; in carcere eram, et venistis ad me” (For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in; naked, and you clothed me; sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me). Note also that much of Appleford’s argument is based on a cluster of texts surrounding visitation of the sick.
- 33.
See Little (1971), Fig. 9.
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Ladd, R. (2018). Death is Money: Buying Trouble with the Pardoner. In: Bertolet, C., Epstein, R. (eds) Money, Commerce, and Economics in Late Medieval English Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71900-9_7
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