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The Summoner joins Chaucer’s parade of corrupt clergymen, furthering his satire of church hierarchy. A summoner was a member of the ecclesiastical court who summoned people to the court for crimes against the church, for which the most-feared punishment was excommunication. As the Narrator warns, excommunication is a death sentence for one’s soul, something to be greatly feared. Despite this grave role, everything about the way the Summoner approaches his profession is insincere and shallow. He can only parrot what Latin he hears daily without understanding any of it and goes so far as to preach that forgiveness from the church can be purchased. He uses this twisting of doctrine to take bribes, forgiving people of their sins if they only pay him. Chaucer dwells over the details of the Summoner’s physical maladies, from his red, pock-marked face to his hair loss. Although some scholars read these as signs of leprosy, others see these descriptors as perhaps symptoms of alcoholism or syphilis, physical consequences to the Summoner’s noted vices of drinking and lust. The grotesque depiction of the Summoner may also reflect the bodily grossness of the Summoner’s Tale, which relies on scatological humor.
The Summoner chooses his Tale entirely out of anger at the Friar for telling a story about a corrupt summoner, and in the process highlights his own hypocrisy. While the Friar’s jab at the Summoner can pass for an exemplum, or morality tale, the Summoner uses a fabliau, or a bawdy tale, to suggest all the thunder in the Friar’s preaching amounts to the passing of gas.
His very choice of story genre suggests that he is less concerned with spiritual matters and more focused on worldly matters. The details of the story do not exonerate the Summoner. The Friar in the Summoner’s Tale asks the wife for a pig’s head to eat as a demonstration of his gluttony, even though in the General Prologue we learn that the Summoner loves eating pigs’ heads. The Friar’s exemplum about the danger of wrath in the Summoner’s Tale also highlights that the anger and animosity between both the Friar and the Summoner are at odds with their professions.
