Fragments IV and V of the Canterbury Tales Do Not Exist

Over the last three decades or so, epistemological and methodological critiques of Middle English editorial theory and practice have rendered relatively common the complaint that modern editions of Chaucer obscure the actual uncertainties pertaining to the surviving texts and misrepresent how those texts would have been received by Chaucer's contemporary audience.¹ Dovetailing with iterations of long-standing editorial debates, such as how to respond to the variant tale order in surviving witnesses of the Canterbury Tales, this skeptical attitude toward the modern edition prompted Derek Pearsall's famous suggestion for an alternative presented "partly as a bound book (with the first and last fragments fixed) and partly as a set of fragments in folders, with the incomplete information as to their nature and placement fully displayed."² A less radical concession to tale order uncertainty is, of course, already evident in the term "fragments"—the term by which editions such as The Riverside Chaucer explicitly delineate the contents of Pearsall's would-be folders (e.g., "Fragment I"), even if the "folders" themselves remain bound in fixed order.

For most Chaucer critics today, these fragments are a basic given of the interpretive landscape of the Tales: they mark off that which we can be virtually certain Chaucer intended (the order of the tales within fragments) from that for which we have varying and contested degrees of uncertainty (the order of the fragments). Indeed, the concept of the fragment has become so familiar that its specific editorial deployment bears revisiting. As Larry Benson describes in the Riverside's introduction to the Tales,

The work survives in ten fragments, labeled with Roman numerals in this edition (the alphabetical designations added in parentheses are those of the Chaucer Society, adopted by Skeat in his edition). These fragments are editorial units determined by the existence of internal signs of linkage—bits of conversation or narrative that explicitly refer to a tale just told or to one that immediately follows.³

That the ten fragments are, as Benson puts it, "editorial units" and do not in fact possess surviving codicological reality (at least, not neatly corresponding codicological reality, despite continued speculation that individual tales or sequences circulated prior to their collection in the surviving manuscripts)⁴ is important to remember. To state that the "work survives in ten fragments" is not to assert that it survives physically thus, as a reader new to Chaucer studies might suppose, but rather to explain in shorthand that Chaucer editors have identified, through internal evidence, ten (relatively) stable sequences of tales in the existing manuscript collections.

As an editorial construct rather than a physical reality, then, the constitution of the fragments themselves, in addition to their order, is a product of interpretation and hence subject to debate. Benson's reference to the alternative Chaucer Society fragment designations hints as much, as does, more explicitly and specifically, the parenthetical exceptions of his following statement: "There are no explicit connections between the fragments (save for IX–X and, in the tradition of the Ellesmere manuscript, IV–V) and, consequently, no explicit indication of the order in which Chaucer intended the fragments to be read."⁵ In this present article I focus on the second of Benson's exceptions, the connection between Fragments IV–V, which comprises the so-called Merchant's Endlink (MerE) and Squire's Headlink (SqH). I argue that Benson's recognition of this exception need not be as limited or provisional as his remark implies, but rather the fragment break dividing MerE and SqH, as it occurs in the Riverside and most other modern editions, is not, in any legitimate way, for whatever manuscript tradition, a defensible editorial decision. Instead, the original nineteenth-century rationale for the break—which has not been superseded but simply forgotten by most critics—was founded not on manuscript evidence but rather on artistic assumptions now almost universally rejected. Hence, the designation of two sequences as Fragment IV (or Chaucer Society Group E, consisting of the Clerk's and Merchant's Tales) and Fragment V (or Group F, consisting of...