Simply Greed

I ride in the very back of the party in the General Prologue and is fittingly the most marginalized character in the company. My profession is somewhat dubious—pardoners offered indulgences, or previously written pardons for particular sins, to people who repented of the sin they had committed.I am as corrupt as others in my profession, but my frankness about my own hypocrisy is nevertheless shocking. I bluntly accuses myself of fraud, avarice, and gluttony—the very things that I preache against. And yet, rather than expressing any sort of remorse with my confession, I takes a perverse pride in the depth of my corruption. My earnestness in portraying myself as totally amoral seems almost too extreme to be accurate. My boasts about my corruption may represent my attempt to cover up my doubts or anxieties about the life of crime (in the name of religion) that I have adopted. It is possible to argue that I sacrificed my own spiritual good to cure the sins of others. Yet I don't seem to really consider my spiritual corruption a real sacrifice, since I love the money and the comfort it brings me. Either way, I quickly cover up my statement, which shows at least a flicker of interest in the good of other people, with a renewed proclamation of my own selfishness: “But that is nat my principal entente; / I preche nothyng but for coveitise” (432–433).