Maggots in the Underpants

In Our Mutual Friend, my favorite novel by the tastefully named Charles Dickens, Charlie Hexam is introduced to us in a library looking “at bran-new  pilgrims on the wall, going to Canterbury.”  Unless you, Gentle Reader, possess a genuinely odd set of friends, I make the modest claim that I am almost certainly the only person you know who can name all 31 of those pilgrims. Further, I can summarize each of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, having read them often — oft in Middle English — transferring my notes from the old Robinson edition to the new Riverside version. Whether Chaucer was a Lollard is still being debated.  

This feat of mine stands on two legs.  First, I admired (and feared) my tiny Arkansas high school English teacher who required that every overalled farm boy and farm girl be able to recite the first 18 lines of The Canterbury Tales -– and in Middle English! — in order to graduate. Additionally, we learned that the purpose of the journey was to visit the shrine containing the holy relics of the murdered Saint Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury (1162-1170) the most prepotent saint in England. “From every shire’s end of England to Canterbury they wend/ The hooly blisful martir for to seke.”  And we were introduced to a new word: relic — that which to buss was the primary object of the pilgrimage (also known as the buss to Canterbury).  Much later, I would read the mordant humor of the sarcastic essay by my good friend, John Calvin, briefly entitled An Admonition In Which it is Shown How Advantageous It Would Be for Christendom That The Bodies And Relics of Saints Were Reduced to a Kind of Inventory, Including Those Which Are Said to Exist, as Well in Italy as in France, Germany, Spain, and other Countries. He notes that every apostle must have had at least four bodies and every saint two or three. Calvin suggests building a ship out of the fragments of the cross and asks some pointed questions about how the Virgin Mary’s breast milk was collected. 

Second, in my college, Chaucer was the capstone course reserved for the last semester of English Literature majors.  Not being one of them, it suited my sophomoric whimsy to request special permission to join and compete with them. That I was granted premature and special permission for the class was then – and remains – a matter of considerable satisfaction to me.

Thus, I have been flying with Chaucer a long time and have become something of a cognoscente of fabliaux.

However, over the years, I have concluded that there are many things in Chaucer’s work that are quite inappropriate for discussion in a high school situation and perhaps even in a college class. Whatever their private reflections, none of my teachers ever called attention to an extremely important and scurrilous section in The Pardoner’s Tale. 

At the tail end of The Pardoner’s Tale, the Host, Harry Bailey, is offered first chance to pay up and kiss the relics that the Pardoner is carrying.  Harry responds:

                                “Nay, nay!” quod he. “Thanne have I Christes curs!

                                 Lat be,” quod he, “it shal nat be, so theech!

                                  Thou woldest make me kisse thyn olde breech,

                                   And swere it were a relyk of a seint,

                                   Though it were with thy fundament depeint!”

In modern English the lines read:

                                    “No, never! I’d rather have Christ’s curse!

                                     Let it be!” said he, “You’ll never succeed with me.

                                     You would make me kiss your filthy underwear,

                                     And swear it was the relic of a saint, 

                                     Even though the garment was stained by your own butt.        

In its entirety The Pardoner’s Tale reflects the fears of England in the grip of the devastation caused by the Black Death and the hope for great miracles at the holy shrine. 

Sadly for us, Chaucer’s pilgrims never reached Canterbury and the shrine of the holy, blissful martyr, but Chaucer had seen the site. From the distinguished and fastidious visitors, Desiderius Erasmus and John Colet, who were allowed to kiss items not shown to ordinary pilgrims, we have a detailed account of what could still be seen there a hundred years later (see Daniel Knapp, The Relyk of a Seint, English Literary History, 39 (1972) 1-27). Among these relics were the goat-hair shirt and underpants worn by Saint Thomas in order to mortify the flesh.  “After Becket’s death, the monks who attended his body discovered [hair breeches] beneath his archiepiscopal robes and plain monk’s habit.  They are described as boiling with lice seeking to leave the cold body[.]”  In addition to the lice, the monks discovered  “maggots in a long, open wound doubtless caused by the garment itself.” Obviously, to kiss this garment would be a penitential exercise in itself

This is a new ass-pecked of the Pardoner’s Underpants that in all my reading and rereading I had not previously reckoned with. I reckon that, first, Chaucer’s poetry is worth the effort to read in Middle English.  Second, Chaucer with Shakespeare and Milton are the glorious fathers of our splendid mother tongue.  Third, credulity and skepticism, humanity and divinity, tear at us all our lives–nowhere more so than on our own Pilgrimage to Canterbury or wherever our tails may end. Fourth, our conclusion can be briefs and shorts.  From my devotional experience, I recommend that you change your underpants at the appearance of the tenth louse, thereby avoiding the maggots all together, unless, of course, you are conducting a scientific study on what it takes to gag a maggot.