Society and nature in the 'Cook's Tale.' (Chaucer) Woods, William F..

Roger of Ware begins his prologue by recalling, with low delight, some key terms from the Reeve's Tale. He cites Symkyn's "argument of herbergage," and the sensitive matter of "pryvetee," both of which express the bourgeois preoccupation with making and maintaining one's separate place in the social world. These terms also have a bearing on the central themes of Fragment I because they suggest how a town-dweller might restate Arcite's profound questions about fate and free will: "What is this world? What asketh men to have?" The echo of these great questions in the Cook's Prologue predicts their reappearance in his tale, where a predatory urban hunger for sensation provides less comforting an answer than even the parasitic, expansionist rural greed in the Reeves Tale. What sets the Cook laughing for joy -- a compulsive, unsettling laughter not unlike his excessive drinking later in the tales -- is the revenge on Symkyn, the "jape of malice in the derk" (4338)(2) which leads to his being thrice beaten, and thus robbed and defamed. It is apparently such an amoral, sensationalist pursuit of satisfaction that Roger means to recount in his own tale ("God forbede that we stynte heere" [4339]), where it will unfold, not in a rural university town, but in the familiar streets of London, "in oure citee."

The change of setting from country to city accompanies a substitution of shopkeeper for householder and apprentices for clerks. Missing in this secular urban context is the stabilizing framework of church hierarchy and the moral imperatives Implicit in the clerks' offices in the church, if not in their conduct. The bureaucratic structure of the church casts a shadow, at least, of overarching values, but the Cook's prologue and tale offer merely the social structure defined by commerce. Man's service to God, and his duties toward other men (as in a host-guest relationship), give way here to the reciprocal duties of commercial exchange.(3)

The locus of this exchange is the Master Victualer's shop, its nexus the cash box. The flow of cash from hand to hand suggests the larger world of urban commercial transactions in much the same way that the mill and "grinding" suggest rural commerce In the Reeve's Tale. But before we are told about the victualer's shop in the tale, we encounter Roger's own shop in the Prologue. This is a shop in the poor district of Southwerk, full of flies and stale or tainted food. The Reeve's maundering introduction about aging is matched here by the equally suggestive vision of decaying meat pies served up by a cook with an open leg ulcer. The Reeve's initial remarks prepared us for a tale of avarice and its companion, "lack," where social needs -- both sexual and economic, familial and regional -- are denied by Symkyn's theft and the boundless greed that drives it. The Cooks Tale also promises to deal with theft. But here the Reeve's transformative motifs of deprivation and role shift (stealing another's substance means that a miller becomes a "false clerk," and the clerks, "ill millers"),(4) are replaced by motifs of the decay of social and commercial norms that pervades the thriving London marketplace, the heart of plenty.

This theme of mutability and decay -- of the bad apple that spreads its rot to "al the remenaunt" (4407) -- is the final variation, or better, devolution of the theme of plenitude in Fragment I. In the Knight's Tale, the golden chain of love represented the fullness of creation bound by divine law. In the Miller's Tale, Alysoun is a "caged," domestic source of nature's plenty. But in the Reeve's Tale, the fruitfulness of both milling and marrying is exploited by Symkyn's expansive greed. And in the Cook's Tale, the "plenty" inherent in the act of exchange is also subverted, not by greedy milling or the vengeful love-making that mirrors it, but by the moral inversion that is implied by a commercialized, and thus infinitely replicated act of love. In a moral sense, and perhaps in a commercial sense as well, "swyving for sustenaunce" is a way of life that famishes what it feeds. As the end point of this reductive progression from cosmic creation to the volume of trade, and from the "firste moevere" to reactive sensuality, the Cook's Tale might seem, like the Age of Iron in Ovid's Metamorphoses (I), to represent both a moral mutation and an irreversible blurring of social identity.

But appearances can be deceiving. For what little we have of the Cook's Tale itself is dominated by the vivid portrait of the London apprentice Perkyn Revelour. As in the Miller's Tale, where Nicholas, Alysoun, and especially Absalom seem to embody the small town setting, expressing it through metaphors related to their clothing and their characteristic activities, Perkyn allows us to visualize the busyness (if not the business) of London as he dances, leaps and hops from the shop to the ridings in Cheapside, to the streets where he plays at dice, and sometimes even to Newgate prison. The three young people in the Miller's Tale convey, in a variety of ways, the vitality of Oxford town life, refreshed by its nearness to the country fields and flowers. Perkyn's description is correspondingly "vital," and carries details from all three of those earlier portraits. He dances as nimbly as Absalom, he is brown haired and neatly made like Alysoun ("a propre short felawe") and like Nicholas, he is associated with "mynstralcye," with singing and with playing on "gyterne or ribible." Furthermore, he is as "sweet," and as "ful of love and paramour" as any of those three, and his nature asserts the claims of youth and sexualityjust as theirs did.

But if Perkyn's energy is not much different from that of Nicholas and Absalom, his expression of it has a different significance because it runs directly counter to the social and commercial codes of conduct for this urban setting, standards represented by the constraints imposed in the shop of the Master Victualer.(5) In this sense, Perkyn is like a male version of Alysoun, a dapper, restless, bird-like youth whose nature simply can not be pent up "narwe in cage" -- or in his master's shop. Like Alysoun's housewifery, every aspect of Perkyn's social and even professional conduct is indirectly an expression of his sexuality. His dancing is such a recurrent, characteristic feature of his behavior that it seems a compulsion, like a fever in the blood that will not subside until he has danced it all away: "Out of the shoppe thider wolde he lepe -- / Til that he had al the sighte yseyn, / And daunced wel, he wolde nat come ageyn -- " (4378-80). The vaguely sexual overtones of Perkeyn's dancing-hopping-leaping are reinforced by the unmistakable double-entendre of casting a pair of dice "in place of privetee," and by the phrase that links "dys, riot [and] paramour," making them sound like equivalent activities. Furthermore, playing on "gyterne or ribible" is probably associated with the kind of "mynstralcye" that Nicholas performed with Alysoun (He kiste hire sweete and taketh his sawtrie, / And pleyeth faste, and maketh melodie" 3305-6). The difference is that while John's jealousy suffered from Alysoun's skittishness, Perkyn's master pays for his "dys, riot or paramour" in good hard cash. Sex with Alysoun is one sign of John's economic status, but in the Cooks Tale, sex becomes the exact equivalent of money or money making, since the fullness of Perkyn, s social life depends upon his emptying the master's cash box.

The opposition between Perkyn and his master suggests a division between two contrary worlds of exchange. The orderly transactions within the shop increase the master's wealth, and provide for his apprentices. Conversely, the dicing and other "transactions" outside the shop constitute a limitless, orgiastic consumption of those resources. This obvious contrast between getting and spending, reminiscent of Winner and Waster, or the fable of the ant and the grasshopper, is nevertheless crucial to this fragment of a tale. Perkyn is a hopeless apprentice because his hunger for the world drives him out of the shop where he must see everything and then act it out -- spend it all -- in his dancing. In this he is not formally different from Palamon and Arcite, who watch Emelye roaming in her castle garden from their cramped prison cell, and then, much later, fight for her in the larger "garden" of the forest glade. There are additional analogies to the Miller's and Reeve's tales, where Nicholas and Absalom, and Alayn and John envision the desirable in a constrained locus (like Nicholas's bedroom or Symkyn's mill), and then proceed to an ampler space (like John's rafters or the fens) where their gazing is translated into action which dramatizes, amplifies, and usually exposes to ridicule the motives that were implicit in the earlier vision of the desired. In each tale, this formulaic release, or escape of vision into action has seemed a natural, "necessary," perhaps fated event because it is driven by men's fundamental desires, or orientations. Similarly, in the Cook's Tale, it seems inevitable that theft and riot are "convertible," since a riotous apprentice is perpetually driven by the pursuit of his own pleasure to leave his shop and convert his master's money. By contrast, "revel and trouthe" ("trouthe" meaning loyalty to the shop) are always at war -- "they been ful wrothe al day," at least for young men of "low degree" like Perkyn.

Only in the Cook's Tale, however, is youthful excess presented as an entropic drain on a domestic economy. Even in the Reeve's Tale there is something redeeming in the night-long "easement" of Aleyn and John, because it leads to the healthy deflation of Symkyn. But the Cook's narrative is cut off too soon for any such balance to be worked out. We are left with Perkyn's move to the house of a fellow thief (another lover of "dys," and so forth), and the possibility that the petty "conversion" of the master's cash box will be repeated here, in this wilder street-locus, where the stakes may very well be higher. However, the opposition between the master's and Perkyn's kinds of conversion does assume an elegant, though apocalyptically vulgar symmetry in the last line of this fragmentary tale. Here at last (as when Righteousness and Peace, the daughters of God, kiss each other in ultimate harmony [Psalm 8510]), mercantile "trouthe" and urban revel are finally "convertible" -- "equivalent" -- because the thief's wife has a shop but "swyve[s] for hir sustenance"[4422).

Indeed, in the alternative locus of the wife's shop, love and commerce undergo a metamorphosis not unlike the role exchanges in the Reeves Tale. Here, "love" really is "commerce."(6) Unlike the Victualer's shop, this is no fortress of comestibles surrounded by the hungry riot of the city, but a feast of revel and paramour. Here too, as in each of the earlier tales, the men's pursuit of love or profit finds its goal, but also its embodiment, in a woman. In other words, Emelye merges, in metaphor, with Arcite's funeral pyre;(7) Alysoun's body and her house become analogous, mutually signifying tropes for "privetee";(8) Symkyn's wife and daughter provide a surrogate "milling," by which Symkyn's pretentions are ground fine;(9) and the thief's wife, like the master's cash box, has herself become the nexus of this family business. She and her shop are a source of plenty(10) linked with the "outer" world of revelry, preying on it while being preyed upon. In effect, the wife's house functions as a version of pastoral. It is a mercantile oasis, a sort of "Eden" where the controlled, profitable, but tedious labor of the London shops (i.e. "supply") is in harmony with -- coupled with -- the "demand" of riot and paramour that reigns in the streets to which Perkyn was always escaping.(11) A false Eden, no doubt, but for whom we can only guess, because when the tale breaks off, Perkyn is the only character we know well enough to predict, and even he has been described almost wholly in terms of his characteristic activities in the London streets.

In fact, what the Cook mainly provides, in this tale with only one developed portrait and no action, is a powerfully suggestive urban setting (Cf. Scattergood 15-16), a foregrounded sequence of urban scenes which probably would have been less memorable, had they been followed by a fabliau-style narrative. The life in the streets is of low degree like Perkyn himself, but its flow is ceaseless and its fundamental vitality is irresistible. Perkyn is drawn daily from his shop to merge with the life of the city, and to the extent that we too are drawn, the Cook's Tale is a slice of raw urban experience, a measured (and measuring) glance at a "lower," growing, and perhaps, to Chaucer's audience, threatening social world that counters the world views implied by the Knight's, Miller's and Reeve's tales, views proper to the court, the urban bourgeoisie, and the prosperous, ambitious dwellers of the country towns.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the Cooks Tale as setting is its ambivalence, a central feature of the realism peculiar to the Canterbury Tales. Perkyn's world is divided between two shops, the master's domain of merchant's "trouthe," and the wife's shop where good business practices are subsumed by the practice of revelry. Each shop is the symbolic center of an extended social group -- merchant workers and player-thieves -- and each projects its own kind of moralized commercial ambivalence.(12) The wife's shop is certainly a false Eden in a moral sense; whatever its attraction as a play shop haven, where a banished apprentice is welcome to set up his bed (with potential bedswappings analogous to those in the Miller's and Reeve's tales), this is, after all, a house of prostitution, and it suggests a devaluation of both love and commerce even beyond what we find in the Reeve's Tale. By contrast, the master's shop would remain the moral center and the commercial norm of the Cook's Tale, were it not that Perkyn's life in the streets appears characteristic, even normal to the London that we are allowed to see in this tale. Contrasted with its urban background of communal gambling, dancing, singing, riding and (in place of privetee) fornicating, the master's shop seems proper enough but rather bleak in comparison.

For what is stirring about this base street life that charms Perkyn is not its social value, exactly, but its inclusive, public vitality. Not since the Knight's Tale have noisy, happy crowds been a part of the narrative setting, and even there, the people were spectators only, a marginalized real-world frame for the higher, aristocratic "reality" of chivalry. But the street life of the Cook's Tale is "carnivalized," to use Bakhtin's term, and is itself, to a considerable degree, the substance of the Cook's narrative. The call of the streets with their "free-market" gambling, sex and thievery draw Perkyn away from his well-regulated shop, promising a narrative development that will reflect, and perhaps even celebrate his move from the master's orderly trade to the wife's commercialized riot and paramour. Given what we have of it, the Cook's Tale might very well have become a tale of exuberant low degree: its vitality, the continuing spectacle of life in the streets, its plenitude, the fullness, density and immediacy of experience in this urban scene, its terror, the formlessness of that experience, rendered best by dancing that ends only in satiety, or perhaps in death.

The urban scene surrounding the victualer's shop permits an analogy between the Cook's Tale and the other tales in Fragment I because it is really a version of nature. In both communal and individual ways, the persistent presence of London street life in this tale suffuses, subverts, yet ultimately sustains the closely-held order of social custom, because it forces compromises between will and necessity, between mercantile prudence and consumer appetites. Human nature in this larger, and perhaps "lower" sense has a grand ambivalence which is in turn a sign of its completeness: it embraces all contraries, both sweet and bitter. In the other tales of Fragment I, the sweetness of nature is uneasily "contained" by social structures, framed by garden walls, or the walls of a house, and embodied by men and women who are, at least in a part of themselves -- in their sensations and desires -- nature's minions. In the Cooks Tale, similarly, Perkyn is as full of love and paramour "As is the hyve ful of hony sweete" (4373), and the wife's shop promises to be yet another impossible promise of concord between nature and society, another illusory garden of earthly delight. By contrast, the penalty of (human) nature in these early tales is the chill of exile, when the paradise garden is no longer habitable. Surely, the wife's shop could no more be a permanent haven for Perkyn (or for any other man) than Emelye's spring garden, Alysoun's bed, or Symkyn's darkened house. No matter. The revel of the streets, whose jangled "melodye" galvanizes young men like Perkyn, will continue to charm them as their lives are danced away.

The Cook's Tale is remarkable for the conciseness with which it states these paradoxes of human nature. Perkyn's street charisma, which apparently makes it easy for him to gather "a meynee of his sort / To hoppe and synge and maken swich disport" (4381-2), when seen from the master's point of view, is merely a kind of social contagion, a valid ground for dismissing this "ripe" young man, who is "ny out of his prentishood" (4400), yet thoroughly corrupt, and likely to corrupt others. The wife's shop is another instance of this social paradox of the ripe-rotten. Her place of business is certainly (like the homes kept in Westminster and probably Southwerk by wives whose housework was prostitution [Rosser 144]), a fruitful source of income, but at the same time, a rotten apple in the barrel that is London.

Ending Fragment I with the Cooks Tale is perhaps not so much a way of hinting at the increasing rottenness of late-fourteenth-century English urban culture, as chivalry glides into obsolescence and both politics and commerce become centralized in London, but rather a way of restating a familiar dialectic. The conflict between social order and natural change -- a recurrent theme in the tales of Fragment I -- here becomes a tension between regulated and unregulated exchange in a mercantile setting. In the Cook's simple terms, the orderly, guild-regulated exchange in Perkyn's master's shop is related to the compulsive and essentially ungovernable exchange of gambling and prostitution as ripeness is to rotten. But are we justified in raising such a lofty structure of idea upon such a slight, and admittedly, commonplace pair of metaphors? Whatever we might think of Perkyn's relative ripeness, it is a fact that this ungovernable apprentice works in a victualer's shop. Here is a term that does recall a particular economic controversy, requiring a brief excursus into the politics of London trade during the decade before, and the few years after the time in the late 1380's when Chaucer began writing the Canterbury Tales.

London, like any large medieval town, was dependent upon a ready supply of staple foods, and upon the regulation of food prices. The daily import of fish, for example, provided a necessary source of cheap protein for the poorer classes, and made the regulation of the price of fish a major source of contention between the fishmongers and the city government.(13) The powerful fishmonger's guild was the largest of what had become known as the victualing guilds. Victualer, who were essentially importers, strove to monopolize the trade in fish, wine, poultry, meat, bread, fruit or vegetables, and thereby drive up prices. The non-victualing guilds of London, by contrast, had no stake in food monopolies. Normally, they attempted to cut their overheads, as well as their own living expenses, by lobbying to expand the food market so that competition would drive prices down. In the Parliament of 1382, for example, the victualers being divided by internal "business jealosies" against the fishmongers (Bird 79), the non-victualers' influence prevailed. The license to sell fish was thereupon extended to London citizens not belonging to the fishmongers guild, as well as to "foreigners" (Englishmen who lived outside London, and did not have the "freedom of the city" which they ordinarily needed to trade there), and even to "aliens" (foreign nationals such as the Flemings). As for the "free fishmongers of London," they "were forbidden altogether to buy fresh fish for re-sale, excepting only eels, pikes and luces" (Bird 78-9). Perkyn, then, as an apprentice in a victualing guild, is dwelling in the midst of an ongoing struggle in which the victualers, led in the 1370's and early 1380's by the wealthy and apparently ruthless Nicholas Brembre, sought to control their own prices and to influence the politics of London trade. Perkyn's master, we would suppose, is selling his unspecified foodstuffs as dearly as he is allowed to do by his guild and by the city government, and to that extent at least, "regulated exchange" is an issue in this tale.

It remains to find a connection with "unregulated exchange," and here we may begin by observing that the economic status of Perkyn's master is established by the very fact that he keeps a shop. As a retailer, he is neither a member of the poor, nor a great merchant who deals wholesale, making enormous profits on perhaps a wide variety of goods, but a member of the "middle" merchant class, the "mediocres," which was a large group that included retailers, journeymen, apprentices -- all those not distinguished by their wealth or poverty (Thrupp 32-4). Perkyn is also, by definition, a member of this middle group, having somehow paid his fee of entrance into apprenticeship. But as the tale commences, he has been dismissed from the shop, and so has lost his avenue of entry into the guild. Perhaps it was inevitable that these things would happen to Perkyn. He is, after all, an apprentice "of low degree." Yet for the purposes of the tale, that is probably the most important thing about him. For when Perkyn leaves his shop, he joins (rejoins?) a very different kind of trade brotherhood. No doubt it is appropriate that he has come to live among these thieves and prostitutes, but in so doing, he has pretty certainly moved downward into the ranks of London's poorest class. The significance of this move lies in the contrast it creates between the victualer's shop, where prices are protected as much as possible, and the house of the thief and his wife, where prices are held down, one would think, by the impossibility of a monopoly in either of these trades.

As it happens, there was in London a similar, politically significant contrast between the prosperous members of both the victualing and non-victualing guilds, and the numerous lesser members of both groups. Victualers and non-victualers not infrequently fought each other in the streets, it is true, but as Ruth Bird has made clear (63-76), the most bitter controversy derived from the opposed interests of the wealthy merchants and the London poor. Nicholas Brembre, the wealthy grocer, became Lord Mayor of London in 1377 partly because he had influence with the heads of the powerful victualing guilds, but also because he had friends in the city's privileged class, and because he was aided by the king. Brembre's chief opponent was John Northampton, a member of a non-victualing guild (drapers), but more importantly, a self-proclaimed champion of the poor.

Upon his election to the mayoralty in 1382, Northhampton's attempts to reform London politics included the election of the city's Common Council, not geographically by wards, but by guilds, which would have given by far the greater influence to the more numerous and less-wealthy non-victualers. Other reforms initiated by Northampton were to force bakers to make farthing loaves available for purchase by the poor, and as mentioned above, to extend the license to sell fish, while restraining the fishmongers from buying up fish and cornering the market. While his ultimate goal was probably to break the political power of the wealthy merchant families of London, Northampton was at the same time something of a demogogue. As Bird says, "All the evidence points to the conclusion that Northampton's secretary, Usk, was speaking the truth when he accused his master of attacking the wealthy and powerful merchants of London by encouraging the jealousies they roused among their poorer fellow-citizens -- his object being to maintain himself in power" (75). Much of Northampton's political leverage derived not merely from the London masses, but also from the city government's uneasiness about those masses, who hated fishmongers, high prices, and the great merchants whose wealth and political influence were created by journeymen's labor.

As Perkyn moves from the privately owned, guild-regulated, protectionist confines of the victualer's shop to the thief's free-market household, we may indeed be meant to hear an echo of the long-enduring London controversies over food prices, high or low, fixed or free market. Of course it could be argued that John Northampton's low-priced-food regulations in 1382-84 were fully as restrictive for the fishmongers as the fishmongers' or vintners' monopolies had been for the buying power of the London poor. The point is that this tale is told by a cook -- hardly an impeccable shopkeeper, yet still a victualer, in effect -- and his narrative conditions us to understand Perkyn's downward progress from a guildsman's point of view, to see it as a kind of dissolution, a social but also an economic failure of structure and control. Chaucer's audience would not have sympathized much with this lower milieu, or with its social and economic Implications. By contrast, Nicholas Brembre's strongest supporter after 1382 was King Richard II, and it was that alliance, strengthened by Brembre's own loans to the crown, that led to his death on the scaffold in 1388 (Bird 90-95). By the 1380's, Richard was an unpopular, and for many, a hated king. Yet he was Geoffrey Chaucer's king, and it may have been that this little story of a victualer and some thieves seemed a strong enough reminder of Brembre's death and the king's failed attempt to prevent it, that it seemed wiser not to continue, not to give the tale an audience. We will probably never know. What we can be certain of is that in the years after Brembre's death, "the old rivalry between [Northampton] and Brembre still dominated the imagination of their fellow-citizens and supplied their parties with catchwords, so that it was found necessary as late as 1394 to forbid the [public] mention of their names" (Unwin 154).(14)

Returning to the microcosm of the Cook's Tale, we find these great issues of price regulation and social class restated in the simpler but perhaps more suggestive terms of fabliau economics. While the master drives Perkyn out of the shop as someone linked to thievery and the hemorrhaging of capital, the wife welcomes him into the shop (along with many others), presumably because the more who plunder what she has, the more she profits. This neat equation recurs later, in a fully developed form, at the conclusion of the Shipman's Tale, where the merchant's wife transforms her bedroom into a counting house, as it were, by telling her husband to "score it [her debt to him] upon my taille" (VII. 416). This is "domesticated commerce," where market forces are internalized, merging with the intimate economy of private life. In the Cook's Tale, such an achieved resolution is still a mere potential. The sense of place we retain is that of the world "outside" the walls of orderly society and commerce, an arena of urban naturalism as yet unmediated by even the compromised tradesmanship of the thief's shopkeeper wife. It is the sensible impact of these urban streets, the covert gleam of their myriad vices, promising quick money, pleasure and social mobility,(15) that sustains the truncated, unresolved narrative, symbolizing its main themes. Like nature itself, this is a primal, savage world, and a mutable one that embraces both vitality and decay. Also like nature, it is a world that invades the orderly shops where the violence of market forces is somehow tempered. Most important, it is necessarily as much a part of the interior world of every character in this setting as Perkyn's dancing is a part of him, thrusting him out of the quiet shop and into the streets to "make his fortune," but more importantly, to hazard a new life of his own, with its peculiarly urban joys and hard compromises.

Works Cited

Aers, David. "Representations of the `Third Estate': Social Conflict and Its Milieu Around 1381." Southern Review 16 (1983): 335-49.

Bird, Ruth. The Turbulent London of Richard II. London: Longmans, 1949.

Benson, Larry D., et al., ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton, 1987.

Hahn, Thomas. "Money, Sexuality, Wordplay, and Context in the Shipman's Tale." Chaucer in the Eighties. Ed. julian N. Wasserman and Robert J. Blanch. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1986. 235-49.

Kolve, V. A. Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1984.

Levy, Bernard S. "The Quaint World of The Shipman's Tale." Studies in Short Fiction 4 (1967): 112-18.

Lyon, Earl D. "The Cook's Tale." Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Ed. W.F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster. 1941; New York: Humanities Press, 1958. 148-54.

Richardson, Janette. "The Facade of Bawdry: Image Patterns in Chaucer's Shipman's Tale." ELH 32 (1965): 303-13.

Riley, Henry T., ed. Memorials of London and London Life in the XIIIth, XIVth, and XVth Centuries, A. D. 1276-1419. London: Longmans, 1868.

Scattergood, V. J. "Perkyn Revelour and the Cooks Tale." Chaucer Review 19.1 (1984): 14-23.

Sharpe, Reginald R., ed. Calendar of Letter Book H. Calendars of Letter-books Preserved Among the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London at the Guildhall. 50 vols. London: J. E. Francis, 1899-.

Stanley, E. G. "Of This Cokes Tale Maked Chaucer Na Moore." Poetica 5 (1976): 36-59

Thrupp, Sylvia L. The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 1300-1500. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1948.

Unwin, George. The Gilds and Companies of London. 4th ed. 1963; London: Frank Cass, 1966.

Woods, W. F. "The Logic of Deprivation in the Reeves Tale." Chaucer Review. In press.

_____. "Metamorphic Comedy: The Shipman's Tale." Chaucer's Humor: Critical Essays. Ed. Jean E. Jost. New York: Garland, 1994. 207-28.

_____. "My Sweete Foo': Emelye's Role in the Knight's Tale." Studies in Philology 88 (1991): 276-306.

_____. "Private and Public Space in the Miller's Tale." Chaucer Review 29.2 (1994): 166-78. (1) Lyon finds no source or complete analogous for the Cook's Tale, and concludes that "Chaucer was fictionalizing contemporary people and events" (154). Stanley argues that the theme of "incautious `herbergage'" central to the first three tales of Fragment I is give its conclusive formulation at the end of the Cook's Tale. Scatter good examines the literary relations of Perkyn's character. Kolve provides a substantial treatment of the tale as reflecting a compromised "mercantile idealism" (279).

(2) All quotations from Chaucer are drawn from Benson, et al., ed., The Riverside Chaucer.

(3) John Leyerle, in a recent (September 1994) address, identified Chaucer as the first major artist to describe the commercializing of the host-guest relationship, a convention that had reflected cultural norms for social interaction since the times of Homer.

See also Kolve, who argues that a narrative voice expressing "a prudential, mercantile ethic" begins directly after Perkyn's portrait and contrasts with it: The tone [in line 4389] has become suddenly moral, though in a highly specific way. Its ethos is that of trade, its standards those of profit and respectability" (269). Kolve provides a helpful discussion of bourgeois London in the late-fourteenth century, "where economic success was systematically translated into ideas of social distinction and moral worth" (270).

(4) The locus classicus for this kind of mutually transforming change is Dante's Inferno (XXV.79-151), circle eight, bolgia seven, where thieves and serpents eternally exchange forms. In Chaucer, the motif appears as the exchange of roles, as when the Shipman's merchant and monk affect features of each other's professional conduct. See Woods, "Metamorphic Comedy: The Shipman's Tale."

(5) Cf. Scattergood:

The portrait of Perkyn Revelour ... may owe something to the many lazy servants in earlier literature, or to Langland's "wasters"; but his major similarities seem to me to be with the would-be fashionable, dissipated urban wastrels who were just becoming subjects for satirical treatment and who appear frequently and recognizably in the poetry and drama of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (16).

(6) On the now-familiar metaphoric interplay between love and commerce in the Shipman's Tale, but in some of Chaucer's other tales as well, see Richardson, Levy, Aers and Hahn.

(7) See Woods, "My Sweete Foo': Emelye's Role in the Knight's Tale."

(8) See Woods, "Private and Public Space in the Miller's Tale."

(9) See Woods, "The Logic of Deprivation in the Reeve's Tale."

(10) The metaphoric identification of woman and cash box is not as fanciful as it might seem. Essentially the same equivalence is implied by Alysoun's tasseled, brass-beaded purse (I.3250-1), and by "The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse."

(11) Stanley, in a compatible reading, sees the wife's shop as the Cook's reductive resolution to the host-guest problem, which is dramatized in various ways by the other tales in Fragment I:

The last few lines of The Cook's Tale give the recipe for carefree herbergage: though the lodger be a thief, no loss if a thief in cahoots puts him up; though the lodger be a swiver, no danger if the landlady is a whore, and no honour to lose if the pimping landlord is her husband" (59).

(12) Kolve associates the tale's divided social perspective with the Cook's ambivalent character and narrative voice:

What most interested Chaucer in The Cook's Tale, as I read it, was the self-conscious appropriation of moral values by a rising, trade-oriented middle class, and their compromised expression by Roger of Ware, cook of London, whose divided allegiance seems likely to constitute a subtext to the tale he tells (279). (13) The classic study of the London guilds from Anglo-Saxon times through the seventeenth century is Unwin's The Gilds and Companies of London. Unwin should be supplemented, however, by Bird's the Turbulent London of Richard II, and by Thrupp's definitive work, The merchant Class of Medieval London, 1300-1500.

(14) Bird, citing Riley (526-7), and Sharpe (364), claims that such a proclamation was made as late as 1396-97 (90, n. 3).

(15) Scattergood suggests that Perkyn's role may reflect the issue of social mobility: "A point made frequently by those who criticize dissipated urban wastrels is that they assume life styles beyond their substance and their rank" (21).