"When English poet and civil servant Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, he was given a burial plot in Westminster Abbey. He received the honor not because he was the author of the famous Canterbury Tales, but because he had served in the office of Clerk of the King's Works. Though history remembers him for his poetry, Chaucer spent most of his life leveraging his many connections in order to get jobs in the royal court. He served as a valet to King Edward III and fought for England in the Hundred Years' War. Only in his later years, with his career and royal pension secured, did he turn to poetry. He produced epic poems like Troilus and Criseyde and The Legend of Good Women. His best-known work, however, was The Canterbury Tales, the account of a storytelling contest between pilgrims en route to Thomas Becket's shrine at Canterbury Cathedral. The tales are a milestone of English literature, as well as a fascinating record of life in medieval England."
Speaking of iambic pentameter, one of the Canterbury Tales, was the "Summoner's Tale". We find these lines there:
And fro the bench he droof awey the cat,
And leyde adoun his potente and his hat
Or as we might say:
And from the bench he drove away the cat,
And laid down his walking stick and his hat,
We are talking about the friar, visiting an ill parishioner. In The Chaucer Review (Volume 52, Number 2, 2017) we read about this scene that it demonstrates "that the cat may be simultaneously read as naturalistic and symbolic, representing at the extreme both a much-loved pet and the threat of damnation. This reading is applied to Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale in order to argue that the cat displaced by Friar John offers a pointed criticism of the hypocrisy of the mendicant orders."
This argument of Paul Hardwick's could be stated more simply: the friar was not a kind person.
The whole tale is here .
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