The Summoner's Tale

"The Summoner's Tale" is one of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

The tale is a fierce counterpunch to the preceding tale by The Friar, who had delivered an attack on summoners. Summoners were officials in ecclesiastical courts who delivered a summons to people who had been brought up on various charges; the office was prone to corruption, since summoners were infamous for threatening to bring people up on charges unless they were bought off. The Friar had accused them of corruption and taking bribes and the Summoner seeks to address the Friar through his own story.

There are in fact several tales which the Summoner tells and all of them directed at friars. The main tale of a grasping friar seems to contain many original elements composed by Chaucer but Jill Mann suggests that it is based on 'The Tale of the Priest's Bowels', a French thirteenth-century fabliau:

'A pious priest, when on his deathbed, was urged by two holy friars to revoke some of the charitable bequests he has already made, so that he may give something to their order. The priest promises to give them a precious jewel, which turns out to be a gaseous release from his bowels.'

The bawdy story the Summoner tells in his prologue seems to be an inversion of a story in Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogus miraculorum. In Heisterbach's story, a monk ascends to heaven and finds his fellow Cistercians living under the cloak of the Virgin Mary. In the Summoner's version the friar descends into hell and not seeing any other friars believes they are all such goodly men, but the angel who accompanies him says to Satan:

With that the freres (friars) fly out Satan's ers (arse), swarm about the room and disappear back up his ers.

A friar went to preach and beg in a marshy region of Yorkshire called Holderness. In his sermons he begged for donations for the church and afterward he begged for charity from the local residents. The Friar interrupts the story, calling the Summoner a liar, but is silenced by the Host.

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