Summary and Analysis of The Summoners Tale :: Canterbury Tales The Summoners Tale Essays

Summary and Analysis of The Summoner's Tale (The Canterbury Tales) Prologue to the Summoner's Tale: The Summoner was enraged by the tale that the Friar told. He claims in response to the Friar that friars and fiends are one and the same. He tells that a friar once was brought to hell by an angel and remarked that he saw no friars there. However, Satan lifted his tail and thousands of friars came out from his ass and swarmed around hell. Analysis The Summoner becomes insane with anger upon hearing the Friar's Tale, which, although it was told with great vitriol against summoners, had a measured manner and refrained from personal attacks. Where the Friar was intensely contemptuous yet civil, the Summoner becomes a brutish and ill-tempered barbarian. Rather than combating the image that Friar's Tale had given of his profession, the Summoner confirms the worst about the low qualities of his kind. The Summoner's Tale: A friar went to preach and beg in a marshy region of Yorkshire called Holderness. In his sermons he begged for donations for the church and afterward he begged for charity from the local residents. He went to the house of Thomas, a local resident who normally indulged him, and found him ill. The friar speaks of the sermon he gave and essentially orders a meal from Thomas's wife. She tells the friar that her child died not more than two weeks before. The friar claimed that he had a revelation that her child had died and entered heaven. He claims that his fellow friars had a similar vision, for they are more privy to God's messages than laymen, who live richly on earth, as compared to richly spiritually. He speaks about how, among the clergy, only friars remain impoverished and thus close to God, and tells Thomas that his illness persists because he has given so little to the church. When Thomas remarks that his wife is angry, the friar launches into a tirade about the ill effects of i re in men of high degree. He tells the tale of an angry king who sentenced a knight to death because he returned without his partner and automatically assumed that he had murdered him. When a third knight lead the condemned knight to his death, they found the knight that he had supposedly murdered. When the third knight returned to the king to have the sentenced reversed, the king sentenced all three to death: the first because he had originally declared it so, the second because he was the cause of the first's death, and the third because he did not obey the king.