After being interrupted by the host Harry Bailly and reprimanded for the poor quality of his first story, Sir Thopas, which was compared to a turd, Chaucer launches into one of the longest and some would say most boring of all the tales.
The tale's length has resulted in its omission in some modern English editions, such as Nevill Coghill's translation.
The story concerns Melibee who is away one day when three enemies break into his house, beat his wife Dame Prudence, and attack his daughter, leaving her for dead.
[2]: 216–18 Melibee, and Thopas before it, form a self-referential joke; Chaucer was already a well-known poet by the time he wrote The Canterbury Tales, but Chaucer-the-character's two submissions to Harry Bailly's contest are a doggerel poem and an inelegant prose tale, neither of which seem appropriate for a poet of Chaucer's skill and renown.
The tale is a serious and philosophical take on "civic violence and its management", which would have had particular importance for Chaucer and his audience, given the deadly political turmoil of London in the late fourteenth century.