14th Centuary Clergy People & Church Corruption

The Church:

Through the ecclesiastical characters in The Canterbury Tales Chaucer constructs a representative picture of the condition of the Church and her ministers in his age. The Church had then become a hotbed of profligacy, corruption, and rank materialism. The Monk, the Friar, the Summoner, the Pardoner, and the Prioress are all corrupt, pleasure-loving, and materialistic in outlook. They forget their primary duty of guiding and edifying the masses and shepherding them to the Promised Land. The Monk is a fat. sporting fellow averse to study and penance. The Friar is a jolly beggar who employs his tongue to carve out his living. The Prioress bothers more about modish etiquette than austerity. The Pardoner is a despicable parasite trading in letters of pardon with the sinners who could ensure a seat in heaven by paying hard cash. The Summoner is, likewise, a depraved fellow. These characters fully signify the decadence that had crept into the Church. The only exception is the "Poor Parson' apparently a follower of Wyclif who revolted against the corruption of the Church.

14th Centuary Clergy People 

There is a whole group of ecclesiastical figures, representing in their numbers and variety the diverse activities of the medieval church. Most of them are satirical portraits, in their worldliness and materialism only too faithfully representative of the ecclesiastical abuses against which Wycliffe struggled. First of all there is a Monk, who cares only for hunting and good cheer. His bald head shines like glass, his bright eyes roll in his head. He rides a sleek brown palfrey, and has "many a dainty horse" in his stables. His sleeves are trimmed with fine fur at the wrists ; his hood is fastened under his chin with a gold love-not. As a companion figure to the hunting Monk, Chaucer gives us "Madame Eglantyne," the Prioress. She is a teacher of young ladies, speaks French "after the school of Stratford-atte-bowe." is exquisite in her table-manners, counterfeiting as well as she can the stately behaviour of court.

 

Other ecclesiastics are there, hangers-on and caterpillars of the church. The Friar, intimate with hospitable franklins, innkeepers, and worthy women, despises beggars and lazars. The Summoner is a repulsive person with "fire-red cherubim face". The Pardoner "come from Rome all note" has a bag full of pardons which he sells as relics of the holy saints to gullible people. Chaucer's treatment of these evil churchmen is highly good-natured and tolerant. He never takes the tone of moral indignation against them. But he does better, he sets beside them, as the type of true shepherds of the church, a "poor Parson," such as, partly under Wycliff's influence, had spread over England, beginning that great movement for the purification of the church which was to result, more than a century later, in the Reformation. Chaucer paints the character of the Parson, poor in this world's goods, but "rich of holy thought and work," with loving and reverent touch. The Parson's brother travels with him—a Plowman, a "true swinker and a good", who helps his poor neighbours without hire and loves them as himself. He reminds us of Piers the Plowman, in the wonderful Vision which is the antitype of Chaucer's work.