The Shipman’s Tale

The Shipman’s Tale, one of the 24 stories in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. It is based on an old French fabliau and resembles a story found in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron.

In the tale told by Chaucer’s Shipman, the wife of a rich merchant convinces a young monk that her husband refuses to pay for her clothes and asks him to lend her 100 francs. Smitten, he agrees. The monk then asks the husband to lend him 100 francs to buy cattle, and the monk gives the sum to the wife, who thanks him by taking him to bed. When the merchant later returns from a journey, the monk says that he has repaid the debt by returning the money to the wife. The wife admits that this is so but says that she thought it was a gift and that she used it to outfit herself as becomes the wife of a successful merchant. She then offers to repay her husband with her “jolly body.” Chaucer indulges in a bawdy pun about repayment by “taille” (meaning either tally or tail).