Yet the highly traditional nature of the Summoner's attack--its deployment of the well-worn topoi of anti-fraternal satire--functions to remove the tale from the specific context of late-fourteenth-century English history. As Penn Szittya says about antifraternalism, "the poets, like the polemicists before them, are writing less about the friars than about an idea of the friars, less about men they have seen begging on the streets of London than about numberless and placeless figures who are the sons of Cain and the allies of Antichrist, men whose final significance lies not in history but at its End." . . . In effect, then, the lines of social opposition are here drawn not along class lines (as in the Miller's Tale) but instead according to the traditional division of lay versus clerical. And, Thomas's churlish wit is revealed to be in need of a supplementary interpretation that can be provided only within the context of aristocratic play.

*****

Far from their being any question of peasant independence or class antagonism, the Summoner's Tale presents us with a rural world united in its opposition to the fraternal orders--orders that had originally, of course, preached a dangerously radical social message but that are now represented as hopelessly, laughably corrupt. The true forces of social change abroad in Chaucer's historical world are thus definitively disarmed, and we retreat into a world of aesthetic appreciation, in which peasant energy, however potentially threatening, is reduced to a playful manipulation of the images of the official culture that leaves the realities firmly in place.

*****

In short, Chaucer presents a brief allegory of the seigneurial reaction to peasant demands, and then shows, in the squire's translation of Thomas's challenge back into the dehistoricizing language of antifraternal discourse, how those demands are displaced and finally appropriated to the traditional structure of medieval society. And finally, of course, this is an allegory of Chaucer's own practice of articulating but finally containing the voice of political protest.

Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Wisconsin, 1991), 318-21