Choosing Thou or You to Reveal Ideal Relationships in “The Knight’s Tale” Raychel Haugrud Reiff If a noble person living in fourteenth century England attended a party and thanked the host by saying, “I thank you for inviting me to your wonderful party,” the host would willingly accept the guest’s gratitude. But if the guest said, “I thank thee for inviting me to thy wonderful party,” the host would be offended, thinking either that the guest was mocking him or that the visitor had no manners. On the other hand, if a fourteenth-century noble person’s son or daughter gave the party and the parent said, “I thank you for inviting me to your wonderful party,” the child would hurt, questioning why the parent was acting in such a cold manner. But if the parent said, “I thank thee for inviting me to thy wonderful party,” the son or daughter would be happy. Thou and you pronouns could not be used interchangeably by the English noble men and women of Chaucer’s time. Addressing a person with the correct pronoun was extremely important; in fact, proper pronoun usage was part of the chivalric ideal that showed “both the social awareness of the speaker and the relationship between the speaker and the person addressed.”1 In the fourteenth century, the second-person singular pronoun had two forms: thou/thee/thy and ye/you/your, with thou and ye being used as subjects of clauses, thee and you as objects of clauses, and thy and your as possessives. This is not the way in which the English language was originally spoken. In the era of Old English and early Middle English times, these same pronouns were used, but the pronoun you was always plural while thou was singular. But starting in the late thirteenth century, English-speaking people began using the plural you when speaking to a single person to signify a polite but distant relationship between members of the upper class, or to address a person of a higher rank, or to display emotional coldness. Thou pronouns continued to be spoken, but they now demonstrated either a close intimacy or social distancing. English linguistics professor David Crystal explains these distinctions: [End Page 69] The you forms would normally be used: *by people of lower social status to those above them (e.g., ordinary people to nobles, children to parents, servants to masters); *by the upper classes when talking to each other, even if they were closely related; *as a sign of a change (contrasting with thou) in the emotional temperature of an interaction. The thou forms would normally be used: *by people of higher social status to those below them (e.g., nobles to ordinary people, parents to children, masters to servants); *by the lower classes when talking to each other; *in addressing God; *in talking to ghosts, witches, and other supernatural beings; *in an imaginary address to someone who was absent; *as a sign of a change (contrasting with you) in the emotional temperature of an interaction.2 Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” demonstrates this usage; it is a medieval romance that shows ideal relationships since the tale is, as critic W. A. Davenport writes, “the epitome of the fourteenth-century court poem, expressing in wide-ranging poetic language the interest in chivalry of the court of Edward III, combining military techniques and courtly practices with elaborate rituals of love.”3 In this romance, which critic Laurel Amtower claims “may well represent the most penetrating critique of identities and their idealized form in the entire Canterbury Tales,”4 the knights and ladies, who are all honorable, display model relationships with people, including other members of the gentility, sworn brothers, and courtly lovers; with the natural world; and with the gods. Part of their ideal code of behavior includes the way they speak to one another, something the fourteenth-century knight Geoffroi de Charney, author of Livre de Chevalerie or Book of Chivalry, claimed was a requirement of chivalry because knights, he writes, must always seek honor “while maintaining in word and deed and in all places their honor and status.”5 One way Chaucer shows...