The Franklin's Tale

Finally, to get rid of him and in a lighthearted mood, she makes a rash promise and tells Aurelius that he might have her love providing he can dispose of all the rocks on the coast of Brittany.

Aurelius finally manages to secure the services of a magician-scholar of the arcane arts, who, taking pity on the young man, for the princely sum of a thousand pounds agrees "thurgh his magik" to make all the rocks "aweye" "for a wyke or tweye" (possibly by association with an exceptionally high tide).

While the Franklin claims in his prologue that his story is in the form of a Breton lai, it is actually based on two closely related tales by the Italian poet and author Boccaccio.

This is fitting for a writer like Chaucer who wrote a book (for his son Lewis) on the use of the astrolabe, was reported by Holinshed to be "a man so exquisitely learned in al sciences, that hys matche was not lightly founde anye where in those dayes" and was even considered one of the "secret masters" of alchemy.

The earliest examples of the "rash promise" motif are found in the Sanskrit stories of the Vetala as well as Bojardo's Orlando Innamorto and Don Juan Manuel's Tales of Count Lucanor.

[7] Morgan considers that Aquinas' Summa Theologiae and Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae were important influences on Chaucer in writing the Franklin's Tale.

[8] Hodgson likewise emphasises how in phraseology reminiscent of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae, Dorigen ponders why a wise and benevolent God could create in "thise grisly feendly rokkes blake" means to destroy and to produce no good "but evere anoyen".

[9] D. W. Robertson considers that Arveragus comes across as "not much of a husband"; he exerts himself with many a labour and many a "great emprise" not for the sake of becoming virtuous, but to impress his lady and when he learns of her rash promise he advises her to go ahead and commit adultery, but only to keep quiet about it "up peyne of deeth.

[14] Helen Cooper writes that the absolutes considered in the tale are moral qualities (patience, fredom or generosity, gentillesse, trouthe): "Averagus comforts his wife, and then bursts into tears.

[17] A. C. Spearing writes that one of the important messages of the Franklin's Tale is that our vision of the right way to live, or how to do the right thing in problematic circumstances "does not come to us directly from God or conscience, but is mediated by internalised images of ourselves as judged by other human beings.