The Vows In Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

Myles Bevenue

Mrs. Adcock

English IV

5 December 2015

The Vows The Canterbury Tales is a story written by Geoffrey Chaucer. During the “Middle Ages” some of the members of the Catholic religion were very corrupt. In the story seven of the main Catholic members and some more people go on a missionary trip to Canterbury. Geoffrey Chaucer listens to each person’s story, and notices some inconsistencies. The stories they tell are very discrepant with what they are supposed to believe. There are four vows that each character breaks respectively. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s, The Canterbury Tales, the religious people that were supposed to be very righteous, were in actuality some of the most greedy and materialistic people of those times. One of the

This vow means that you are to follow any and everything that the church tells you, and to follow the morals and standards that the church has set for every member of the church. The friar is the only one to break the vow. He does not obey the things that are supposed to be followed. “Sweetly he heard his penitals at shrift with pleasant absolution for a gift” (Geoffrey Chaucer). The Cleric is the only one that obeys the vow of obedience. He is the smartest student at Oxford. He is a very righteous and faithful person. He follows every vow and promise he has made to the church. “He had found no preferment in the church and he was too unworldly to make search for secular employment” (Chaucer, Geoffrey). He had found no wrongs in the church. He was too godly to look for a job in the secular world. He is the epitome of what the other characters are supposed to be. The religious people were the most gluttonous people of those times. They would take the money that they said they did not have, and spend it for their personal gain. The Catholic church in the Middle Ages is not the one the congregation would have preferred. Geoffrey Chaucer did a great job in pointing out just how corrupt the leaders of the church could