The Reeve’s Tale

The Reeve’s Tale, one of the 24 stories in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. The tale is one of the first English works to use dialect for comic effect. In outline it is similar to one of the stories in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron.

The old Reeve (bailiff), a woodworker, tells this bawdy tale in response to “The Miller’s Tale” of a cuckolded carpenter. The story tells how two student clerks, speaking broad Northern dialect, avenge themselves on a dishonest miller.