The Reeve’s Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Reeve repays the Miller for the latter’s insults

The Reeve’s Tale follows immediately after the Miller’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and is told as a rejoinder to it. A reeve, in medieval society, was in the pay of the lord of the manor, responsible for seeing that the lord’s crops and animals were looked after. Under the feudal system, the villagers were required to work partly on the lord’s land, or offer a portion of their professional services, for no return other than the lord’s protection and access to his court of justice. The reeve acted as the lord’s enforcer to make sure that this work was done properly, and he was therefore unlikely to be a popular character.

We know that Chaucer’s miller has a “thombe of gold”, meaning that he was adept at cheating his customers, and he would probably have waged a running battle with his local reeve who would doubtless have spent considerable amounts of time trying to prove that the miller was on the fiddle. The reeve of this pilgrimage appears to have fallen out with the miller at quite an early stage; no doubt they saw each other as enemies from the moment they first met.

We know from the General Prologue that the reeve was a carpenter by profession, and that the miller’s tale, about a cuckolded, elderly carpenter, was aimed directly…