Tricks of Time in the <i>Miller’s Tale</i>

Abstract

Chaucer's use of time-reckoning as the device for the trick the clerk plays on the carpenter in the Miller's Tale reveals an increasing commodification of in late medieval England. It also indicates a new understanding of how that commodity could then be translated into social power, specifically in regards to rank and status. In Merchant's Time and Church's Time in the Middle Ages, Jacques Le Goff explains that Among the principal criticisms leveled against the merchants was the charge that their profit implied a mortgage on time, which was supposed to belong to God alone. 1 Sylvia Thrupp's study of London merchants in the fourteenth and fifteenth century reveals, however, that this economically productive use of was not exclusive to the merchant class. 2 Likewise, Paul Strohm observes that was not the sole possession of merchants, or even the slightly more inclusive group comprised by 'the bourgeoisie,' and that church's did not belong to the church alone. 3 Craig E. Bertolet, while agreeing with Le Goff's designation of time in general, asserts that the definition should be expanded to include nobility, clergy, and most peasants. 4 The need to expand the definition of merchant's to include, oddly enough, the Church suggests that perhaps merchant's and Church's are not categories so definitive as previously held. Indeed, closer examination of the historical evidence and the literature of late medieval England reveals a more cohesive and less conflicted relationship between these two notions of than we find presented in Le Goff's work. 5 What remains important about Le Goff's work, however, is his observation of the relationship between the productive use of and social position in the late Middle Ages. In the Miller's Tale time-reckoning functions both as a signifier of social relations and the tool by which those relationships are established, rein- forced, and contested. The ability to make productive use of provides the means by which the clerk hatches his plan and carries it to fruition. Yet the role time-reckoning plays in the duping of the carpenter remains largely unexplored in the scholarship surrounding the Miller's Tale . 6 When John and Nicholas are first introduced in the tale, they are described, first