The Reeve's Tale

16th century German depiction of a miller at work.

"The Reeve's Tale" (written in the original Middle English as "The Reeves Tale" without an apostrophe) is a bawdy comic short story in verse from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. The story's narrator is a reeve who used to be a carpenter. In the prologue to the tale, he is named as Oswald.

The story is a direct response to "The Miller's Tale" which precedes it. In "The Miller's Tale", a foolish carpenter is outwitted by a student who has sex with the man's wife. In "The Reeve's Tale", a cheating miller is outwitted by two students who have sex with the man's wife and daughter.

The two students in the story come from north-east England and their speech is different from the southern English dialect in which the rest of The Canterbury Tales is written. "The Reeve's Tale" is both the earliest known text which attempts to differentiate between two different dialects of English and the earliest known English work which uses a character's accent for comedic effect, something that continues to be a feature of comedy to this day.

Plot

Near Cambridge, there lives a miller called Simkin. He is a very arrogant man. He is always boasting to defend his honor and that of his family and always carries a sword, dagger and knife with him for that purpose. His equally arrogant and snobbish wife, who is described as being from a good family, is in fact the daughter of the local priest. They have a 20-year-old daughter named Malyne and a baby son who is not yet one year old. Simkin is also a bully who cheats his customers with the help of his "golden thumb" (i.e. using his thumb to tip the scale in his favor and overcharge), keeping some of their flour for himself. Amongst his regular customers is the Cambridge University college of Soler Hall.

One day, the person who is usually responsible for taking Soler Hall's corn to be ground into flour is too ill to make the trip to Simkin's mill. Two students, John and Alein, volunteer to make the journey instead. They are certain that they can use their intelligence to prevent the miller from stealing from them. On arrival, they tell Simkin that they are both eager to learn about mill work and want to watch him grinding the corn into flour. Simkin agrees but, while the students are not looking, he unties the horse on which they both arrived. The students' runs off after some wild mares. When John and Alein notice that their horse is missing, they chase after it. While they are gone, Simkin takes some of their flour and has it made into a loaf of bread.

Depiction of the Reeve from an early manuscript of The Canterbury Tales. The manuscript is now in the Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California.

John and Alein finally catch up with the horse at nightfall. It is too late for them to ride back to Cambridge and they ask Simkin if they can stay the night at his house. He agrees. Simkin, his family and the students have a meal with large quantities of ale before they all go to sleep in the same room. John and Alein share one bed, Malyne sleeps alone in another and Simkin and his wife share a third. The baby's cradle is at the foot of the bed of Simkin and his wife. Knowing that Simkin took advantage of his and John's absence to steal some of their flour, Alein is determined to get satisfaction in some other way. While the miller is asleep, Alein gets into Malyne's bed and forces her to have sex with him.

Knowing that the other students, not least Alein, will laugh at him for having missed out on making love to Malyne, John feels the need to have a sexual encounter of his own. When Simkin's wife gets up to urinate, John sees his chance. He moves the cradle so that it is at the foot of his own bed. In the dark, Simkin's wife feels for the cradle so that she can find her bed again. She gets into bed next to John, believing him to be her husband and is surprised when he begins vigorously making love to her.

Shortly before dawn, Alein leaves Malyne's bed. Before he goes, Malyne and Alein declare their love for each other. Malyne also tells Alein where he can find the bread which her father had made from the flour that he stole from the two students. Alein gets into the bed without a cradle at the foot of it. Mistaking Simkin for his friend John, he begins to boast about how many times he made love to the miller's daughter. The enraged miller attacks Alein. During their fight, they fall onto the bed in which John and Simkin's wife are still sleeping. In the dark, Simkin's wife mistakes her husband for one of the students. She strikes him on the head with a club while the two students beat up the miller and flee. Both students ride off to Cambridge, taking the flour and the bread with them; both get a good laugh of their revenge with the beating of the cheating Miller and the double humiliation on his wife and daughter;d espite their tearful farewells Aleyn has no thought of either Malyne or whether she is now pregnant with a child. which will ruin her parents' plans to make an advantageous marriage for her. The Reeve ends his tale with the words, "Thus have I quit the Miller in my tale", meaning "I have paid back the Miller with my story" and goes on to say that the story demonstrates the proverb "Hym thar nat wene wil that yvele dooth" (One who does evil fares badly) and concludes "A gylour shal hymself bigyled be" (a deceiver will himself be deceived)

External links

• Original Middle English text of "The Reeve's Tale" on Wikisource.
• Quotations from "The Reeve's Tale" on Wikiquote.