The Reeve's Tale

"The Reeve's Tale" is the third story told in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The reeve, named Oswald in the text, is the manager of a large estate who reaped incredible profits for his master and himself. He is described in the Tales as skinny and bad-tempered. The Reeve had once been a carpenter, a profession mocked in the previous Miller's Tale. Oswald responds with a tale that mocks the Miller's profession.

The tale is based on a popular fabliau (also the source of the Sixth Story of the Ninth Day of The Decameron) of the period with many different versions, the "cradle-trick." Chaucer improves on his sources with his detailed characterization and sly humour linking the act of grinding corn with sex. The northeastern accent of the two clerks is also the earliest surviving attempt in English to record a dialect from an area other than that of the main writer. Chaucer's works are written with traces of the southern English or London accent of himself and his scribes, but he extracts comedy from imitating accents, a comedic device that is still popular today.

Summary
Simpkin is a miller who lives in Trumpington near Cambridge and who steals wheat and meal brought to him for grinding. Simpkin is also a bully and expert with knives (q.v. the coulter in the Miller's Tale). His wife is the portly daughter of the town clergyman (and therefore illegitimate, as Catholic priests do not marry). They have a twenty-year-old daughter Malyne and a six-month-old son.

When Simpkin overcharged for his latest work grinding corn for Soler Hall, a Cambridge University college also known as King's Hall (which later became part of Trinity College), the college steward was too ill to face him. Two students there, John and Alan, originally from Strother in North East England, are very outraged at this latest theft and vow to beat the miller at his own game. John and Alan pack an even larger amount of wheat than usual and say they will watch Simpkin while he grinds it into flour, pretending that they are interested in the process because they have limited knowledge about milling. Simpkin sees through the clerks' story and vows to take even more of their grain than he had planned, to prove that scholars are not always the wisest or cleverest of people. He unties their horse, and the two students are unable to catch it until nightfall. Meanwhile, the miller steals the clerks' flour and gives it to his wife to bake a loaf of bread.

Returning to the Miller's house, John and Alan offer to pay him for a night's sleeping there. He challenges them to make his single bedroom into a grand house. After much rearranging, Simpkin and his wife sleep in one bed, John and Alan in another, and Malyne in the third. The baby boy's cradle sits at the foot of the miller's bed.

After a long night of drinking wine, Symkyn and his family fall fast asleep while John and Alan lie awake, plotting revenge. First Alan gets up and quietly approaches Malyne in her bed so as not to startle her and make her cry out, and the two have sex. When the miller's wife leaves her bed to relieve herself of the wine she's drunk, John moves the baby's cradle to the foot of his own bed. Upon returning, the miller's wife feels for the cradle in order to identify her bed, and mistakenly assumes that John's bed is her own. When she enters his bed, John leaps upon her and begins having sex with her.

Dawn comes, and Alan says goodbye to Malyne, whom he'd enjoyed three times during the night. She tells Alan to look behind the main door to find the bread she had helped make with the flour her father had stolen. Seeing the cradle in front of what he assumes is John's bed (but is in fact Symkyn's), he goes to the bed, shakes the miller &mdash;whom he thought was John&mdash;awake and recounts that he'd just slept with Malyne. Symkyn rises from his bed in a rage, waking his wife in John's bed, who takes a club and hits her raging husband by mistake, thinking him one of the students. John and Alan flee without paying for their food and lodgings, taking with them the bread and horse. The Reeve goes on to say that the Miller was well beaten not having been paid for the lodging, food or his services. The Reeve is believed to have trained at Trumpington College, Cambridge, a specialist college for such professions.

Source
Although scholars are reluctant to say that Chaucer ever read the Decameron, Chaucer's story is very close one told in Day IX, Tale 6 of that set of Italian tales, in which two clerks lodge with a innkeeper for the night. One of the clerks, who has long been an admirer of the innkeeper's daughter, slips into her bed while she is asleep and, after her fears are overcome, they both enjoy sex together. Later, a cat wakes up the innkeeper's wife and she gets up to investigate. The second clerk gets up to go to the bathroom and moves the cradle in front of the innkeeper's bed because it is in the way. After he returns to his bed, the innkeeper's wife returns and feels her way to the bed with the cradle in front of it, which is actually the clerk's bed. She slips in beside him and both are surprised and have sex together. The wife later explains to the suspecting innkeeper that she was in her daughter's bed all night. The story has several differences from Chaucer's in that the clerks do not plot against the innkeeper but are only there to get to his daughter. No mill is even mentioned in the story.

More broadly, this type of tale is known as a "cradle-trick" tale, where the wife gets into the wrong bed because the cradle has been moved. These tales were popular all over Europe in the Middle Ages. One such story is the 13th-century French Le meunier et les II clers. In this tale, the clerks do not know the miller, but are new in town looking for jobs as bakers. The miller has his wife send them into the woods looking for him while he steals their goods. They come back and end up spending a night with the family, and find that the miller's daughter spends every night locked in a bin in order to protect her chastity. During the night, the miller's wife has sex with one of the clerks in exchange for a ring which will restore her virginity. She then gives the clerk the key to her daughter's bin and invites him to have sex with her. The miller later finds out and accuses his wife, only to have her reveal that he is a robber. Other "cradle-trick" tales include the French De Gombert et des deux clers, a Flemish tale: Ein bispel van ij clerken, and two German tales: Das Studentenabenteuer and Irregang und Girregar.

Malyne—"wenche" or rape victim?
Malyne's nose is described as "camus" which people at the time thought indicated eagerness for love. Although she is surprised at the beginning, by the end of the night she seems to be in love with Alan, calling him her "lemman", telling him where the cake is hidden, and that her father stole his flour. Her parallel in the Decameron also finds the night enjoyable after some initial fear and is eager for future meetings with the clerk. Malyne is also described as a "wenche" which usually means "immoral" or "wanton" woman, but can also mean merely "a poor woman". Still, the description of how the clerk Alein stalks up to her bed so she won't cry out has caused scholars to question whether she is indeed a willing sexual partner or whether the scene might more accurately be called a rape. Since Chaucer does not describe Malyne's feelings, it is difficult to know for sure.

Satiric aube
As morning approaches, Alein and Malyne have an exchange of feelings which scholars have described as a mock aube or dawn-song, where two lovers express their sorrow at parting in the morning after a night together. Chaucer himself used aube elsewhere, for example in his Troilus and Criseyde. This type of love poem was usually written in a very high, courtly style and the characters in them were usually knights and ladies, but in this tale Chaucer brings it down to the level of a fabliau, which gives it a strong satire. For example, Alein, instead of saying to Malyne, "I am thy own knight", says "I is thyn owen clerk" (emph. added), and Malyne, between emotional words of parting, tells Alein about a bread in the mill—an odd fixture in any love poem. (This may be a slang term for pregnancy, similar to the modern "bun in the oven," a further humiliation to the Miller.).