The Canterbury Tales, The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale/Chaucer's Retraction

Pardoner: 1) one who pardons. 2) (during the middle ages) an ecclesiastical official authorized to sell indulgences.
Indulgence: the act or practice of indulging; gratification of desire.
Relic: a surviving memorial of something past.


The Pardoner's Tale is an exemplum, a moral anecdote, brief or extended, real or fictitious, used to illustrate a point. The tale is about three men, who after a night of drinking, decide to kill Death for taking their friend and all the good people away. An old man tells them that he has asked Death to take him but has failed. He then says they can find Death at the foot of an oak tree. When the men arrive at the tree, they find a large number of gold coins and forget about their quest to kill Death. They decide that they would sleep at the oak tree over night, so they can take the coins in the morning. The three men draw straws to see who among them should fetch wine and food while the other two wait under the tree. The youngest of the three men drew the shortest straw. The older two plot to stab the other one when he returns, while the one who leaves for the town plots to lace the wine with rat poison. When he returns with the food and drink, the other two kill him and drink the poisoned wine, dying painful deaths. All three have found death under the oak tree.
Radix malorum est cupiditas means covetousness is the root of evil. In the prologue, the Pardoner acknowledges that he is full of sin "My mind is fixed on what I stand to win and not at all upon correcting sin. I do not care, when they are in the grave, if souls go berry-picking that I could save. . .For by this text I can denounce, indeed, the very vice I practice, which is greed." He tells the host and the other people that he is greedy, doesn't care about the people he pardons, and sells fake relics. At the end of his tale, the Pardoner tells the host and the people to come forward with their pennies and he will pardon them. The Pardoner mentioned "a draughte of corny strong ale", which could mean he is drunk. If drunk, it explains why he tells about his faulty sin and in the end asks everyone to come be pardon; everyone already knows that the pardons would be lies and he would keep the money out of greed.
Jeweled Cross and Pigs bones, relics of the Pardoner.

Chaucer's Retraction is the final section of The Canterbury Tales. It is written as an apology, where Geoffrey Chaucer asks for forgiveness for the vulgar parts of this and other works, and seeks absolution for his sins. It is not clear whether these are sincere declarations of remorse on Chaucer's part, a continuation of the theme of penitence from the Parson's Tale, or simply a way to advertise the rest of his works. It is also unclear if the retraction was an integral part of the Canterbury Tales or if it was the equivalent of a death bed confession which became attached to this, his most popular work.