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 characterisation 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.

Summary

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

When Symkyn 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 Aleyn, 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 Aleyn pack an even larger amount of wheat than usual and say they will watch Symkyn while he grinds it into flour, pretending that they are interested in the process because they have limited knowledge about milling. Symkyn 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 Aleyn 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, Symkyn and his wife sleep in one bed, John and Aleyn 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 Aleyn lie awake, plotting revenge. First Aleyn creeps over to Malyne in her bed while she remains fast asleep till he is so near before she might see him "that it had been too late for to crye" (line 4196); and they copulate. 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 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 Aleyn says goodbye to Malyne. She tells Aleyn 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 Symkyn's bed (but is in fact John's), he goes to the other bed, shakes the miller—whom he thought was John—awake and recounts that he'd "thries in this shorte nyght/ Swyved the milleres doghter", Malyne (lines 4265-6). 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 Aleyn beat up the miller as well and flee taking with them the bread and horse. The Reeve goes on to say that the miller was well beaten and his wife and daughter well "plumed" by the students which they consider justifiable payback to the bullying and stealing miller in place of their paying him for the lodging, food or his services.