Paul Strohm (The Knight, the Wife and the wool, Review, 24 January) describes Chaucer’s Knight as “virtuous” and “judicious”, and his tale as a “sober romance”. In Terry Jones’s 1980 book Chaucer’s Knight, he demonstrates that the supposedly gentlemanly knight is nothing but a mercenary, a professional killer, and his tale a crude parody of Boccaccio’s Teseida that reveals the Knight’s own lack of education and little understanding of the tenets of chivalry.
In Chaucer’s day the listeners would have been howling with laughter throughout, from the description of the Knight himself, with his mismatched armour, patently stripped from bodies on the battlefield, to the crude behaviour of the characters in a tale whose subtleties he doesn’t understand, to his own, uncourtly, predilection for accumulating wealth.
Clifton Hughes
Hitchin, Hertfordshire
