The Pardoner's Tale Summary
There were three men who lived in Flanders who did nothing but sinful things. The three
drunkards were in a tavern one night, and, hearing a bell ring, looked outside to see men carrying
a corpse to its grave. One of them called to his slave to go and ask who the corpse was: he was
told by a boy that the corpse was an old fellow whose heart was smashed in two by a secret thief
called Death. The three then made a vow to find Death and slay him.
Not far on their journey they met an old, poor man, who greeted them courteously. One of them
asked the man rudely why he was still alive at such a ripe age. The old man answered that he was
alive, because he could not find anyone who would exchange their youth for his age - and,
although he knocked on the ground, begging it to let him in, he still did not die. The old man also
mentioned it was not nice of them to speak so rudely towards him.
Another one of the men stated rudely that the old man was to tell them where Death was, or
regret not telling them dearly. The old man, still polite, told the drunkards they could find Death
up the crooked way and underneath an oak tree.
The drunkards ran to the tree, finding eight bushels of gold coins. They picked the youngest to
go to town to get bread and wine while the other two men stayed to watch the treasure. The two
men began plotting to stab the youngest on his return. While the youngest was in town he bought
poison to kill the other two men keeping the gold for himself.
Exactly as the other two had planned it, it befell. They killed him on his return, and sat down to
enjoy the wine before burying his body – and, as it happened, drank the poison and died. The tale
ends with a short sermon against sin, asking God to forgive the trespass of good men, and
warning them against the sin of avarice, before inviting the congregation to “come up” and offer
their wool in return for pardons.
The tale finished, the Pardoner suddenly remembers that he has forgotten one thing - that he is
carrying relics and pardons in his bag and begins to invite the pilgrims forward to receive
pardon, he tells the pilgrims the value of his relics and asks for contributions—even though he
has just told them the relics are fake. He offers the Host the first chance to come forth and kiss
the relics, since the Host is clearly the most enveloped in sin. The Host is outraged and proposes
to make a relic out of the Pardoner’s genitals, but the Knight calms everybody down. The Host
and Pardoner kiss and make up, and all have a good laugh as they continue on their way.
The Pardoner’s Tale Analysis
We know from the General Prologue that the Pardoner is as corrupt as others in his profession,
but his frankness about his own hypocrisy is nevertheless shocking. He bluntly accuses himself
of fraud, avarice, and gluttony which are the very things he preaches against. And yet, rather than
expressing any sort of remorse with his confession, he takes a perverse pride in the depth of his
corruption. The Pardoner’s earnestness in portraying himself as totally amoral seems almost too
extreme to be accurate. His boasts about his corruption may represent his attempt to cover up his
doubts or anxieties about the life of crime (in the name of religion) that he has adopted. It is
possible to argue that the Pardoner sacrifices his own spiritual good to cure the sins of others.
Yet he doesn’t seem to really consider his spiritual corruption a real sacrifice, since he loves the
money and the comforts it brings him. Either way, he quickly covers up his statement, which
shows at least a flicker of interest in the good of other people, with a renewed proclamation of
his own selfishness.
The Pardoner’s Tale is an example, a type of story often used by preachers to emphasize a moral
point to their audience. The Pardoner has told us in his Prologue that his main theme is “Greed is
the root of all evil” which never changes. We can assume that the Pardoner is well practiced in
the art of telling this specific tale, and he even inserts some of his sermon into it. The Pardoner’s
point is quite obvious that his tale shows the disastrous effects of greed. The hypocrisy he has
described in his Prologue becomes evident in his tale, as all the vices he lists at the beginning
including gluttony, drunkenness, gambling, and swearing which are faults that he himself has
either displayed to the other pilgrims or proudly claimed to possess. Ridiculously, when he has
finished his condemnation of swearing, he begins the tale swearing his own oath. Such a
hypocritical act is perfectly consistent with the character that the Pardoner has presented to us,
and an example of Chaucer’s typically wry comedy.
The Pardoner completes his tale just as he would when preaching in the villages, by displaying
his false relics and asking for contributions. His act is intriguing, for he makes no
acknowledgment of his hypocrisy. Only a few lines before, in his Prologue, he exposed to the
entire company the fraudulence of his whole operation. It is inconceivable that he would now
expect to get contributions from his fellow travelers—so why does he ask for them? Perhaps, like
a professional actor, the Pardoner enjoys the challenge of telling his tale so convincingly that he
tricks his audience into belief, even after he has explained to them his intensions. In any case, the
Pardoner’s attempt to sell pardons to the pilgrims violates the Host’s notion of fellowship on
which the storytelling pilgrimage is based.