Chaucer’s Uncanny Regionalism: Rereading the North in The Reeve’s Tale

Considered one of the most striking instances of regionalism in medieval English literature, Chaucer’s use of northern dialect in The Reeve’s Tale has monopolized interpretation of the text’s attention to the North of England. The Reeve tells us that his clerks are from “fer in the north” (I.4015),¹ and although he “kan nat telle where” (I.4015), the Reeve aptly mimes a recognizable northern speech. Hoping to stymie Symkyn’s thievery, they long to see “How that the hopur wagges til and fra” (I.4039). Literary historians famously have designated the text’s linguistic northernisms the first use of dialect for comedy in English literature. Among early critics, J. R. R. Tolkien establishes what becomes a frequent refrain, calling the tale’s northern dialect “primarily a linguistic joke” while also claiming it as “dramatic realism” and the product of “philological curiosity.”² Critics in his wake have consequently viewed the tale’s dialect as shallow regionalism born of a few instances of the northern long /a/ amidst other northernisms that largely serve the tale’s literary realism, its inherent comedy, and its context in the quitting game between the Miller and Reeve.

Far from lending itself only to comedy, however, the North maintains a significant and sustained presence within the narrative landscape of The Canterbury Tales. Including the Reeve’s own story, four of the eight tales set on English soil refer to the North of England at some point in their narrative.³ In The Man of Law’s Tale, Constance finds herself washed ashore “Fer in Northumberlond” (II.508) where her own “Latyn corrupt” (II.519) is hardly understood. The devil-yeoman of The Friar’s Tale hails from “fer in the north contree” (III.1413), and the Summoner sets his own tale in Yorkshire in “A mersshy countree called Holdernesse” (III.1710). The Canterbury Tales draws to a close with the Parson’s vehement rejection of the northern alliterative verse form: “I am a Southren man; / I kan nat geeste ‘rum, ram, ruf,’ by lettre” (X.42–3). The region’s repeated appearance in The Canterbury Tales implies that the North has far greater implications for Chaucer than the linguistic humor and realism that has occupied attention for much of The Reeve’s Tale’s critical history.

Only recently have critics begun to move past the philological joke. Notably, Katie Wales offers various historical circumstances that might undergird Chaucer’s use of northern dialect, circumstances that she claims are “completely ignored” by linguistic historians: “the Anglo-Scottish wars of the fourteenth century”; the tense political situation in the years surrounding the likely date of composition of The Canterbury Tales; and “[t]he attention of Richard II . . . entirely focused on the wild borderlands as a political arena.”⁴ Thus, the northern dialect draws on more than a “simple opposition between southern superiority and northern inferiority.”⁵ Literary critics have also largely ignored these circumstances while pursuing new readings of The Reeve’s Tale. Combining cultural history and contemporary fourteenth-century politics, Wales suggests that, through the tale’s northern dialect and other allusions, “the mythology of the ‘North-South divide’ is intensified and complicated by new images of the political and ethnic, as the border conflicts and defence of the ‘frontier’ began to heighten the sense of an ‘English’ nation.”⁶ Given the focus of her study, which aims at a diachronic understanding of the social history of northern English to the present day, Wales does not further elaborate on her provocative comments about The Reeve’s Tale. But her observations adumbrate the literary effect of a northern consciousness on England’s emerging national literature. Such a comment suggests that we might profitably reexamine the North’s role in The Reeve’s Tale as participating in a dialectic of region and nation.

There is clearly something more to be said about the North in The Reeve’s Tale. Rather than its linguistic northernisms, however, I propose to analyze The Reeve’s Tale’s conceptual northernness, viewing the northern dialect as a symptom of...