Examples Of Greed In The Canterbury Tales

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Corruption and Greed in the Canterbury Tales
According to Jeffrey Helterman, “The poet Chaucer, with stories told in different styles by distinct storytellers, plays games with the idea of narration.” (Helterman 10) It is well known that Chaucer uses many different techniques to write his stories, but specifically in the Canterbury Tales he used satire. Satire, as defined by Merriam Webster consists of “humor that shows the weaknesses or bad qualities of a person, government, society, etc.” (Merriam Webster) Throughout the Canterbury Tales Chaucer uses satire to depict the Pilgrim’s lives and reveal corruption in the Church. At the end of the 14th Century the church started to get rich because they governed land that was very profitable. The …show more content…

The crimes vary and they can range from adultery to stealing, but all these crime can cause you to get excommunicated. Like the monk the summoner is corrupt and greedy. “The Friar tells a tale about a summoner who is dragged off to Hell by a devil he has foolishly befriended” (Salter 2). This is ironic and hypocritical at the same time because the friar is stating that the summoner is corrupt, which he is, but he’s also corrupt. The friar is throwing the summoner under the bus. The friar will eventually be dragged off to hell also. All of the church officials preach one thing and do the other. They lie and scare the Noble class so they won’t get involved with their treachery of the commoners. All of this adds up to the main point and it’s that the monk and summoner or any church official is corrupt and greedy. They are just trying to better themselves and are being hypocritical at the same …show more content…

Nobles were expected to be powerful warriors who could be ruthless on the battlefield yet mannerly in the King's Court and Christian in their actions. According to Merriam Webster Noble is being “of, relating to, or belonging to the highest social class” (Merriam Webster). These nobles are supposed to fight to protect the people. These people are suffering while the church is getting wealthier. The nobles are also getting richer. Chaucer realized that even the nobles could be bought and that they are betraying the commoners, which makes them untrustworthy and corrupt. Most importantly there was also pilgrimage which was a strong belief in medieval society. The most important journey was to Jerusalem. During a lot of these journeys the pilgrims would go to cathedrals or churches. They were preserved relics of saints. They believed that these relics had powers. “The work is organized as a collection of stories told by a group of pilgrims on their way to the shrine of Thomas à Beckett in Canterbury” (Trudeau 2) Pilgrims started going to these cathedrals for their pilgrimage because Saint Thomas Becket had been murdered in the Canterbury

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