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Unit 11: The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Non-detailed Study): Discussion and Analysis-III

The Emperor had granted that King Alla could dine with him; and, as she saw her father in the Notes
street, Constance laid down at his needs, and explained to him who she was. There was such joy
between the three of them that it cannot be described.
Later, Constance’s child Maurice was made Emperor by the Pope, but, the narrator reiterates, “Of
Custance is my tale specially”. Constance and Alla came to England to live in joy and in peace, but
sadly, only a year after they had been reunited, Death took King Alla from the world. Constance, at
the very end of the tale, widowed, makes her way again to Rome, to find her father and praise God.

11.1.4 Epilogue to the Man of Law’s Tale

“This was a thrify tale for the nones!” proclaims the Host, happy with the Man of Law’s tale, before
turning to the “Parisshe Priest” to tell the next tale. The Parson then rebukes the Host for swearing
blasphemously, only to be mocked in turn by the Host as a “Jankin” (a derisive name for a priest) and
a “Lollard” (a heretic). The Host, announcing that the “Lollard” will do some preaching, is interrupted
by the Shipman, who objects to the idea of the Parson glossing the gospel and teaching. He promises
a tale which will “clynk” like a merry bell, and wake up all the company. But, the Shipman continues,
there will be no philosophy or legal matters in his tale (unlike in the Man of Laws)–“ther is but litel
Latyn in my mawe!” (there is only a little bit of Latin in my stomach”).

State the moral of the Man of Law’s tale.

Analysis

There’s another moment at the very start of the Man of Law’s Prologue, in which the boundary between
fiction and reality once again seems extremely blurred: the “Geffrey Chaucer” who exists as a character
on the Canterbury pilgrimage is ascribed the bibliography of the Chaucer we are reading by the Man
of Law, who cites works we know that the “real” Chaucer actually wrote. Once again, the Tales
pretend to a real, documentary status, as if they are dramatizing or merely reporting word for word
true events, and real people–and our narrator, Chaucer, seems to elide the fictional world with the
reader’s world.
The Man of Law, then, a “lawyer” is someone concerned with the laws and rules that hold in place
the real world, and–at least, so the General Prologue tells us–he knows by heart all the lines of the
common law: “every statu koude he pleyn by rote”. Carolyn Dinshaw, the excellent feminist critic,
has written that the Man of Law is indeed “of law”, made up of law, his head filled up with laws;
and moreover, she reads the tale of Constance as asserting the status quo of Chaucer’s world at the
time the tale was written.
Women, Dinshaw argues, were a matter of business in the middle ages, and–particularly as the
marriage of a daughter could produce a strong link between two merchants or families–children
were an important financial asset. Constance, then, first appearing in the tale as a tale told by
merchants, is effectively sold forth by her father; the marriage is actually dealt with as if it were a
business deal. The Prologue to the tale tells us that the Man of Law even heard this tale from a
merchant: and it is not a huge leap to make from the business of merchants, trading goods back and
forward across the sea, to Constance, sent from Rome to Syria, to Northumberland, to another heathen
land, and eventually back to Rome. Constance, in other words, serves as “goods”, saleable, valuable,
and whose value, appropriately, remains constant.
Dinshaw then relates the tale as a whole to that end of the Chaucer bibliography the Man of Law
recites in the prologue: the final lines where he disdains to tell a tale concerning incest. The Man of
Law’s Tale is indeed full of contradictions: in Dinshaw’s words.

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