The Reeve's Prologue and Tale
The Reeve's Prologue and Tale is the third story to be told in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The reeve, named Osewold in the text, is the manager of a large estate who reaped incredible profits for his master and himself. He is described in the Tales as skinny and with a bad temper. The reeve had once been a carpenter, a profession mocked in the previous Miller's Tale. Osewold responds with a tale that mocks the miller's profession.Warning: Plot details follow.
A miller lived in Trumpington near Cambridge who stole corn and meal brought to him for grinding. The miller was also a bully and expert with knives. His wife was the portly daughter of the town clergyman, whom the miller married because he wanted a refined wife. They had a twenty-year-old daughter and a six-month-old boy.
When the miller overcharged for his latest work grinding corn for a college in Cambridge, the college steward was too ill to face him. Two students there, John and Alan, were outraged at this latest theft and vowed to beat the miller at his own game. John and Alan packed an even larger amount of flourthan usual and said they would watch the miller while he ground it. The miller untied their horse and the two students were unable to catch their steed until nightfall. Meanwhile, the miller stole even more corn than usual to prove that the scholars were not always the wisest of cleverest of people.
Returning to the miller's residence, John and Alan offered to pay him for a night's lodging there. He challenges them to make his single bedroom into a grand house. After much rearranging was done, the Miller and his wife slept in one bed, John and Alan in another, and the daughter in the third. The baby boy's cradle sat at the foot of the Miller's bed.
After drinking wine for a long time, the Miller and his family fell fast asleep while John and Alan lay awake, plotting revenge. First Alan gets up and, without complaint, gets into the daughter's bed. Then the miller's wife relieved herself of the wine she'd drunk and felt for the baby's cradle in front of the bed. She discovered it by John's bed and joined him there where they made love.
Dawn came, and Alan said good-bye to the miller's daughter whom he'd enjoyed three times during the night. She tells Alan to look behind the main door and find the half sack of flour her father had stolen. He saw the cradle in front of what he assumed was the Miller's bed (but it was John's bed), went to the miller's bed, shook the pillow and told the miller -- whom he thought was John -- how he'd slept with the miller's daughter. The miller rose from his bed in a rage, awaking his wife in John's bed who took a club and hit her raging husband by mistake, thinking him one of the students. John and Alan both flee quickly.