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Criticism of the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale has long held that Roman de la Rose’s Faux Semblant lay behind Chaucer’s portrait of a hypocritical churchman. Yet however much Faux Semblant’s speech may explain the Pardoner’s blatant hypocrisy, the rhetoric and content of his confession and his later intemperate “salesmanship” to the other pilgrims and to Harry Bailly in particular can be derived largely from the commercial discourse of medieval France, specifically the practices of provincial itinerant salesmen revealed in the comic and satiric Old French “trade” poems: Rutebeuf’s “Dit de l’ Herberie” and the anonymous “Dit du Mercier,” which share a surprising number of details with Chaucer’s poem and probably served as models for his tavern realism, his faux relics made with “latoun,” and his treatment of the Pardoner as emasculated. Moreover, like Chaucer’s poem, the two “Dits” are heavily ironic in revealing their narrators’ deceptive and unsavory natures, either through direct confession or through audience inference.
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