Mercantile Ideology in Chaucer's Shipman's Tale

Abstract

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were produced at a time of significant social change following the gradual but inexorable emergence of the urban middle classes, to which Chaucer himself belonged. 1 Participating in the structures of urban government, where wealth was a prerequisite to holding office, merchants as a group were "at the apex of urban society in the later middle ages". 2 Yet despite their wealth and status in the day-to-day life of the towns, despite their professional contacts and associations with members of the nobility, fourteenth-century merchants were not yet regarded as "gentlemen". Excluded from a precariously defined gentry class, the wealthier merchants developed a unifying ideology based on the trade and financial practices which characterized their occupation. It is this ideology, and its implications for urban government, which are constructed as central concerns of Chaucer's Shipman's Tale.

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