The Pardoner's Prologue And Tale

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there.
As seen in the General Prologue, a pardoner is a layman who sells pardons or indulgences, certificates from the pope by which people hoped to gain a share in the merits of the saints and escape more lightly from the pains of Purgatory after they died. This particular Pardoner works for a religious house notorious for fraud in this trade. Just as the indulgence bought with money seems to make confession, absolution and repentance unnecessary, so the fact that pardoners had permission to preach in the churches led to a confusion between them and ordained priests (who alone had power to absolve sinners from guilt).
There was widespread dissatisfaction with pardoners (as also with money-loving Friars) in Chaucer's time, and both were popular subjects of satire and joking. This can be found especially in parts of Piers Plowman, which Chaucer may have known. There was a fully developed satire of the avarice and corruption manifested by so many people associated with the Church, an ...

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encourage the unwilling to come forward by insisting that those guilty of sin, especially unfaithful wives, must stay in their places and not offer him money. As a result, he expects, no one will dare to hold back. He boasts that this relic-business brings him a hundred marks a year in private income.
Then turning to his preaching, he begins by stressing that his only goal is to get people's money; he expresses total indifference to the fate of their souls in a mocking reference to eternal damnation as 'goon a blackeberyed'. The only other reason he has for preaching is hatred: to attack and defame someone who has dared insult pardoners.
The strongest irony comes in lines (Riverside) ...

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