The Reeve's Tale

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 Catholic priests 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.

Malyne

Malyne's nose is described as "camus" which people at the time thought indicated eagerness for love. Although she is surprised at the beginning, by the end of the night she seems to be in love with Alan, calling him her "lemman", telling him where the cake is hidden, and that her father stole his flour. Some critics note that Alan, by covering Malyne's mouth, prevents her from either consenting to the sex or raising the hue and cry. Nicole Nolan Sidhu argues that this scene stages tensions between Christian doctrine and social practices over women's free will in marriage. Her parallel in the Decameron also finds the night enjoyable after some initial fear and is eager for future meetings with the clerk. Malyne is also described as a "wenche" which usually means "immoral" or "wanton" woman, but can also mean merely "a poor woman".

Satiric aube

As morning approaches, Alein and Malyne have an exchange of feelings which scholars have described as a mock aube or dawn-song, where two lovers express their sorrow at parting in the morning after a night together. Chaucer himself used aube elsewhere, for example in his Troilus and Criseyde. This type of love poem was usually written in a very high, courtly style and the characters in them were usually knights and ladies, but in this tale Chaucer brings it down to the level of a fabliau, which gives it a strong satire. For example, Alein, instead of saying to Malyne, "I am thy own knight", says "I is thyn owen clerk" (emph. added), and Malyne, between emotional words of parting, tells Alein about a bread in the mill—an odd fixture in any love poem. (This may be a slang term for pregnancy, similar to the modern "bun in the oven," a further humiliation to the Miller.). .