What happens in Chapter 3 of The Canterbury Tales?
The Miller, clearly drunk and determined, takes over the storytelling and follows The Knight's Tale with a bawdy tale of his own. He recounts the story of John, a wealthy carpenter from Oxford, his young wife Alisoun, and two men who are both after her: Nicholas, a clever lodger and astrology student, and Absolon, a meticulous parish clerk. Nicholas is the first to hatch a plan, convincing John that a second Noah's Flood is on the way and persuading him to spend the night in a tub hanging from the rafters. With John safely up high and praying, Nicholas and Alisoun take advantage of the night together below. Meanwhile, Absolon arrives at Alisoun's window to serenade her. In a moment of mischief, she exposes her bare backside into the dark, and he kisses it. Humiliated, Absolon returns with a red-hot coulter. This time, Nicholas shows his own backside and gets burned. He screams for water; John, thinking the flood has indeed arrived, cuts the rope and falls to the floor, breaking his arm. The neighbors rush in, and John's story about the impending deluge turns him into the laughingstock of Oxford. The Miller wraps up with a carefree indifference to the chaos he has just described.
Analysis
Chaucer's skill in The Miller's Tale works on at least two levels at once: it's both a masterful fabliau and a sharp structural parody of The Knight's Tale that comes before it. While the Knight presents courtly love as a lofty philosophical idea, the Miller anchors similar themes—the competing suitors, the elusive woman, and divine interference—in the physical and the vulgar. The story's structure is almost architectural: two suitors, two windows, two behinds, and two punishments. This arrangement isn’t by chance; it reflects the Knight’s own balanced romantic framework while subtly poking fun at it.
Alisoun is depicted through a vivid array of animal comparisons—a weasel, a swallow, a kid, a calf—that come off as sensuous rather than derogatory, presenting her as a being driven by pure desire and instinct rather than a mere symbol of courtly love. Absolon's discomfort with flatulence ("He was somdeel squaymous / Of fartyng") makes his fate grotesquely fitting: Chaucer crafts poetic justice through the very trait that defines him.
The tale also highlights the Miller's class resentment. His prologue sets up the story as a "quiting" of the Knight, a term that carries both legal and humorous implications—he's settling a score. Chaucer, as the pilgrim-narrator, distances himself by encouraging readers to "turne over the leef and chese another tale," a metafictional nod that draws the audience into the enjoyment they are cautioned against. The tone never strays into cruelty; the Miller's laughter is too generous for that, even embracing the foolish John, whose naivety is portrayed as humor rather than tragedy.
Key quotes from Chapter 3
“He was somdeel squaymous / Of fartyng, and of speche daungerous.”
Chaucer introduces Absolon's defining fastidiousness, the character flaw that will make his punishment feel cosmically inevitable.
“Tehee! quod she, and clapte the wyndow to.”
Alisoun's single syllable of laughter after duping Absolon at the window—pure comic economy, the whole tale's spirit compressed into one sound.
“And Nicholas anon leet fle a fart / As greet as it had been a thonder-dent.”
The moment that triggers the tale's catastrophic finale, escalating Absolon's revenge and setting off the chain reaction that destroys all three men's dignity at once.