The Pilgrim's Tale facts for kids
The Pilgrim's Tale is an English anti-monastic poem. It was probably written ca. 1536–38, since it makes references to events in 1534 and 1536 – e.g. the Lincolnshire Rebellion – and borrows from The Plowman's Tale and the 1532 text by William Thynne of Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose, which is cited by page and line. It remains the most mysterious of the pseudo-Chaucerian texts. In his 1602 edition of the Works of Chaucer, Thomas Speght mentions that he hoped to find this elusive text. A prefatory advertisement to the reader in the 1687 edition of the Works speaks of an exhaustive search for The Pilgrim's Tale, which had proved fruitless
Background
It has been suggested that The Pilgrim's Tale was created as part of a Henrician propaganda campaign, or that it was politically subversive and suppressed as part of Henry VIII's ban on prophecies. (They were deemed felonies without recourse to benefit of clergy. This law was repealed when Edward VI came to power in 1547, but it was reinstated three years later in 1550. The rule was repealed under Mary I and revived in new form by Elizabeth I.) The Pilgrim's Tale both performs and denounces prophesying. After using Isaiah as a prophetic, anticlerical authority, the author of PilgT warns of false prophecies from the devil and rebels such as Nicholas Melton, a leader in the Lincolnshire rebellion of 1536, Perkin Warbeck (1474–1499), a pretender to the crown hanged by Henry VII, and Jack Straw, a leader in the Great Rising of 1381. Later, however, the author exempts Merlin and Bede, since they can be mustered up as anti-Roman Catholic prophets.
Survival
A fragment of The Pilgrim's Tale exists only within The Courte of Venus, which is significant as the first printed anthology of coterie poems. The Courte of Venus itself exists in only three printed fragments whose identities and origins are elusive. It was first printed sometime between 1535 and 1539, probably by Thomas Gybson/Gibson. It was partially reprinted between 1547 and 1549, probably by William Copland as A Boke of Ballettes. It was printed again, probably by Thomas Marshe, in the early 1560s. Marshe's edition uniquely draws upon another source text independent of the other two known printed editions.
No surviving version of The Pilgrim's Tale names its author, but it says its author was an Oxonian, as Chaucer incorrectly claimed to have been in the paratext of the 1602 Speght edition, and it contains numerous references to Chaucer's works. A "comely priest" joins the narrator in criticism of the church, recommending that he read some anticlerical and prognosticatory lines in Chaucer's Romance of the Rose (Benson ed., 7165ff.), which are quoted. The Pilgrim's Tale also alludes to The Wife of Bath's Tale and Arthurian legend in describing a monk whose "mumbling of his holy thinges" banished the faeries and the queen elf but brought in seven worse spirits. Some see in the tale's characterisation of Christ – "and first he dyd yt, and after he taght" – an allusion to Piers Plowman.
See also
