Comparing The Canterbury Tales And The Millers Tale

The Canterbury Tales is a book written by Jeffery Chaucer about 29 people on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket. All the people on the trip meet in the city of Southwork at the Tabard Inn. Chaucer describes each person by their physical features, their clothing, what they bring with them, and their job. While on their journey, these 29 people take part in a competition to see who can tell the best story. The Miller and the Reeve take part in the competition and share similarly vulgar stories. Their stories are similar in that they both contain adultery and humiliation to the husband, but they differ in that one of them contains a small love story.

In the Millers tale, there is a love story within the grossness of the tale.

In the Millers tale, Nicklaus tricks John the carpenter that a flood is coming so each of them should sleep in tubs suspended in the air. While John is asleep in his tub, Nicklaus is going at it with his wife. In the Reeve’s tale, two students are insulted that the Miller, Simpkin, stole some of their grain. To get back at him they decided to have sex with the women of his family. Alan, one of the students, decides to go after his daughter. His daughter does not object and they proceed in their actions. John is the other student who is jealous of Alan and the daughter, so he decides to try and get with Simpkin’s wife. He fools her into thinking he is Simpkin and he proceeds to have sex with her. In both stories the wives of the men have sex with people who aren’t their husbands, but it is worse in the Reeve’s case because his daughter was also involved in the

Simpkin and John humiliated by the students in both stories. In the Reeve’s tale, Simpkin is insulted by the students because they slept with his wife and daughter. In response to their actions, Simpkin tries to fight John, but ends up getting beaten up by both john and Alan. To make tings worse for Simpkin, his wife got a stick with the intent of hitting Alan, but accidently knocks Simpkin to the ground with it. The grain he stole from the students is also stolen back in the form of a half bushel cake. In the Miller’s tale, John has no idea that his wife is fooling around with Nicklaus for almost the entire story. He makes an even bigger fool of himself when he belives that there is a flood coming, but it is just a trick by Nicklaus to spend a night with Alisoun. When Absolon burned Nicklaus, John took Nicklaus’ shouts for water as a warning that the mythical flood was coming, so he cut his suspended tub from its ropes and he crashed to the ground. This caused even more humiliation for John whose wife had just cheated on